Thursday, May 10, 2012

A Spot on the Sun

There was a report of a large sunspot on the face of the sun today, so I got out my telescope and camera and went out to look. I need to use a special solar filter on the telescope so the Sun won't blind me or damage my camera. I was astounded to see how large the spot was, and how complex. I will spare you what sunspots are and what causes them, but they come and go over time as the Sun rotates. After I took a bunch of pictures and looked at them on the computer, I compared the size of the sunspot with a picture I did eight years ago of the planet Venus crossing the face of the sun. Venus is only slightly smaller than earth. Anyhow, the sunspot was MUCH larger than the image of Venus. So this is one BIG sunspot. Please click on it to see it in a larger size and see the complexity of this spot.

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