Sun-spots

Date: 25 October 2003
Equipment: Casio QV-3500EX digital camera coupled afocally to a 25mm eyepiece on a Vixen 114mm f5.3 ED refractor fitted with Baader solar film
Subframes: 10 x 1/400 second.

Our nearest star is currently going through a solar minimum in terms of sun-spot activity, with a disc that is often blank for weeks on end. However, even during the maximum of the previous sunpsot cycle five years ago, having two big active regions such as AR486 and AR484 on the disc at the same time was regarded as rather unusual.

I picked through about forty images and stacked the clearest ten in Registax. A mild sharpening and subsequent yellow colour mask (Baader film gives a white disk) gave the above result.