Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Seeing sun spots today

A dispatch today from Felton Davis of the Second Avenue Star Watchers:
For about an hour this afternoon, while the bright sun was still in the sky, and before the cloud banks covered it over, there was an unobstructed view of the active sunspot regions that have appeared this month.
... and a safe view of the sun...  
And please note ... "Word of caution for serious fans: do not look directly at the sun, and do not set up a telescope unless it is fitted with a 99% solar filter."

5 comments:

Laura Goggin said...

This is so cool, I'm sorry I missed it. Thanks for sharing the cosmos with us, Felton!

Anonymous said...

There’s a little black spot on the sun today….

Felton Davis said...

Little? For amazing close-up photos of 2993, 2994, and 2995, all larger in diameter than our planet, see: "Photos Show Huge Swarm of Sunspots Big Enough to Swallow Earth," Newsweek, April 22, 2022
https://www.newsweek.com/photo-swarm-sunspots-big-enough-swallow-earth-solar-flare-cme-1700107

Grieve said...

About the previous reference... "There's a little black spot on the sun today" is a lyric from "King of Pain," the 1983 song by the Police.

Felton Davis said...

Yeah, 1983, I remember it well. About a hundred guys stuffed into a makeshift prison dorm in the basement of Lewisburg Penitentiary, with asbestos-wrapped pipes above us hanging from the low ceiling, and all you could see through the ground level windows was the concrete wall. The Vietnam vets had their own little space in the corner, where they thrashed out what happened to them in the war, and why they all kept getting in trouble. Each one of them knew a vet who had came home and committed suicide; eventually the suicide toll exceeded the combat toll. And in K-Dorm they were invisible to society, did not appreciate other inmates "invading their space," or as the song suggested, "invading their pain."