2022-12-07 Sun

My first attempt at photographing The Sun after I got my hands on a Baader white light filter.

Well that was fun! My 300mm lens barely able to resolve sunspot details, but I think it came out well. If you squint you can, for the largest sunspot, make out the darker central umbra, which is better than I expected.

I really want to try proper Hydrogen-Alpha observations, but that will have to wait.

Sunspot Size

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations by measuring The Sun's pixel diameter and found the largest sunspot to be ~3.6 Earth diameters. Pretty cool!

Filter Jig

Behold the beautiful white light filter I made for this observation. I got my hands on an A4 sheet of Baader film, and with some (a lot) of tape, this is probably one of the cheapest methods of configuring your DSLR for white light sunspotting. It works great!

Metadata

• Location
  • Name: Oslo, Norway
  • Lat Long: 59.92, 10.72
  • Datetime: December 7th
• Gear
  • Camera: Canon Eos 700D
  • Lens: Pentax SMC Takumar 300mm f/4
  • Filter: Baader White Light Film
• Exposure
  • Aperture: f/8
  • Focal Length: 300mm
  • Shutter Speed: 1/1000s
  • ISO: 200