Good ole Sun

When looking for solar photographs to post here today, I was surprised to find I shot one in January 2022 and another almost exactly a year later -- in January 2023! Winters here tend to be cloudy so the chances of my shooting any astrophotos are low. Sun is emerging from the "quiet" portion of its activity cycle and presenting observers with more features to look at. Recently, most of my Solar shots have been made using a DSLR camera equipped with a 400mm/800mm (with 2X telextender) telephoto lens and white light solar filter. There's virtually no setup involved in photographing Sun this way so if there's a sunny day and sunspots to see, it's easy to get out and do it! The orange color in the first photo below was digitally added, tinting an otherwise grayscale picture. The more intense orange photos, shot in 2023, gain their color from a glass solar filter which seems to add some contrast to the several sunspots visible. Ironically, I am taking a liking to the grayscale photo at the bottom of this page -- one of the deep orange photos I, ironically, processed to remove the color! In that picture some more subtle details can be seen in Sun's photosphere. I'm hoping I can use a telescope for solar imaging this summer as the telephoto lens images are heavily-cropped from the full-frame files and lack some of the quality I expect to see a proper long focal length telescope deliver.

A break in the cloudy/rainy/snowy weather here afforded me the opportunity to see the Sun January 19! It turned out there was quite a bit happening on our nearest star. Two large and very active regions (AR3190 is especially prominent) and smaller sunspots scattered across the solar disk made for interesting viewing -- through a purpose-built solar-safe filter.