2017 August 21 total eclipse - the sunspot groups.

These images show the sunspot groups that were visible on the face of the Sun during the partial phase of the 2017 August 21 total eclipse.

The first image was taken on August 20, 2017, the day before the total solar eclipse with my Canon 70D attached to my 8 inch EdgeHD telescope.  The two sunspot groups include the group near center and another group coming around the east side of the Sun.  The exposure was 1/1000 seconds at ISO 200, f/10.

This image was taken after the end of the total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.  It shows the two sunspot groups visible during the eclipse.  The image was taken with my Canon 70D attached to my 8 inch EdgeHD telescope with an exposure of 1/1000 seconds at ISO 200, f/10.

This is a closeup of the central sunspot group cropped from the above image with a little sharpening and brightness stretching to enhance the appearance a little.

This is a closeup of the sunspot group on the eastern limb of the Sun, just a couple days from making its initial appearance on the eastern limb.  I cropped this from the above image and applied a little sharpening and brightness stretching to enhance the appearance a little.

Eclipse photography practice.

The August 21st Solar Eclipse is just 16 days away so it's time to practice some setup and photography of the Sun.  In this case, I used my Canon 6D with its full frame sensor on my Celestron EdgeHD 8 inch telescope and a white light solar filter.  For the eclipse, I'll use a 0.7x focal reducer to get a bigger field of view for the phenomena around the Sun and Moon.

This is the full image with some sharpening and contrast stretching.  The C8 is an f/10 telescope with 2032mm focal length.  You an see some sunspots a little left and below the center of the Sun.  You can also see lots of granulation on the Sun in general and I was hoping to see a little more activity.  The eclipse is on August 21st, 16 days after this image, so given that the synodic rotation period of the Sun is about 27 days, this sunspot group will be on the other side of the Sun, at least a few days from coming around the edge.  This exposure was 1/1000 seconds at ISO 200 using my Canon 6D.

This is a closeup of the image above to get a better look at the small sunspot group.  You can see at least three sunspots in the group and maybe a couple more small ones if you use your imagination a little.  The Sun was getting a bit low in the sky, so there is some atmospheric color dispersion - the top of the spot looks a little red while the bottom looks a little blue.

Venus Transit, 2012 June 5

I watched the Venus transit from the UofA mall in front of the Lunar and Planetary Lab where quite a few folks were set up to watch the event.  Here, some grad students set up a "Sunspotter" which worked really well, allowing a small group to watch the event simultaneously (while through telescopes, only one person could view the sun at a time).

Zooming in on the image of the sun, you can see Venus on the right side of this image (which is roughly correct N-S, but flipped E-W so Venus is actually on the NE part of the sun), just about to finish transiting onto the face of the sun about 20 minutes after the start of the transit.

A bit later, I had the opportunity to look through a telescope with an H-alpha filter which showed some prominences, sunspots and lots of other phenomena along with the silhouetted Venus.

KGUN-9 weatherperson Erin Christiansen was on site as well. Here, she talks to my friend Dean Ketelsen who had set up a couple of telescopes for visitors to look through.

Here a young girl looks through one of the small telescopes.

Venus was big enough to see as a small speck on the sun even with just a pair of solar viewing glasses as this young lady demonstrates:

I borrowed a larger solar viewing filter that fit over my 75-300 zoom lens and took this shot just holding the filter over the lens.  Focusing and setting the exposure were both challenging.  For reference, this was heavily cropped from the original frame shot at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/500 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 400.

Last glimpse of the Sun's photosphere

This was one of a sequence of shots of the setting Sun last Wednesday night from Kitt Peak. You can just see the last bit of the suns bright surface as it dips below the distant hills. In fact, the edge of the sun is broken into several bead-like parts. I did get about 2 more images before the sun was entirely gone, but this one had the bead affect best. This image was taken at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/640 seconds at f/8, ISO 400.

The McMath Solar Telescope

This image of the McMath Solar Telescope was taken near the end of the Partial Solar Eclipse on April 8, 2005. A mirror at the top left of the building reflects light to the lower right where the primary mirror rests at the bottom of the inclined shaft. It reflects the light back up to about the ground level where another mirror reflects light down into the instrument room where the data are collected and recorded. This image was taken with my Canon A75.

April 8, 2005 partial eclipse

Here is an image of the partial solar eclipse on April 8, 2005. The Moon has occulted the left edge of the Sun and there is a sunspot visible near the top and aonther much smaller one is visible near the bottom of the Sun in this white light projection made with the McMath Solar Telescope. This image was taken with my Canon A75 camera.