Photographing Sunspots

Here comes the sun! AND sunspots! Yahoooo! 

The tripod is sandbagged to reduce any motion as the camera lens is extended to almost its maximum length.

Yay! I have been waiting for sunspots to appear on the sun for awhile now. We have been in solar minimum for several years, but the sunspot numbers are growing and the sky was sunny and clear this morning making it a perfect time for photography.

In order to photograph the sun, you must put a solar filter on the camera so that the sun's rays don't enter the lens and blind you or ruin your camera sensor.

You have to put the threaded filter on the outside of the camera lens as you see here. The SolarLite filter is inexpensive at somewhere between $50-$70. Yes, there are much, much, much more expensive filters, but this one fits my budget.

It makes the solar image that you are taking look yellow-orange in color. This filter has a metallic polymer coating that blocks 99.999% of the light coming into the camera. 

Here is the first photo showing you the basic placement of the sunspots on the right side of the Sun. In this photo, you can just make out some darker smudges on the surface.

Our Nikon P-1000 has a equivalent 3,000 mm zoom. It is not as powerful as a telescope, nor will I ever get as sharp a photo as I would through a high end camera, but it does the job I need it to as it fits my budget!

Here I zoomed in a bit more and you can see the sunspots a bit better.

But wait! What are sunspots? They are areas where the magnetic field of the sun is disturbed. UCAR, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research has a somewhat simplified explanation.

Sunspot groupings are numbered by astronomers for research purposes. How cool is this? And, to think that I can image sunspots on a star that is 93 million miles from Earth is out of this world! Of course, the sun is massive (you can fit a million Earth's inside the Sun) and the sunspots themselves are massive, oftentimes bigger than Earth!

Here is my close-up photo of the sunspots where you can see the magnetic field has been disturbed. You can also see surface granulation that looks a bit pebbly all over the Sun's photosphere. This is where convection currents bring hotter plasma up from deep in the Sun and then cooler plasma sinks downward. By the way, plasma is a state of matter (along with solid, liquid, and gas) that occurs in super hot temperatures (like 100 million degrees F in the center of the Sun.) It is created when one or more electrons get stripped from a gas and the gas becomes electrically charged. It is affected by both electric and magnetic fields. Neato!

Do you want to keep track of what is happening on the Sun and our atmosophere? If so, you might want to check out Spaceweather.com, my go-to place for up to date information. I also get an Aurora Alert from them to let me know when to go outside and view auroras (aka the northern lights.)