20 July 2004

Observing Location	Parkchester (South Condominium oval), The Bronx, NY
Atmospheric Conditions	About 50% fair weather cumulus cover. Warm and dry air.
Instruments	Canon 15x50 Image Stabilized binoculars Baader AstroSolar filter film in home made cell
Observing Party	Charlie Ridgway

Target	Sun
Time	20Jul04; 1348 EDT
Category	Sun
Comments	There is a huge sunspot on the face of the sun right now. spaceweather.com says that it is the size of the planet Jupiter. I can not remember seeing anything this big, even the umbra is big. The picture below was taken with my Nikon CoolPix 950 digital camera. The camera was hand held behind one of the binocular eyepieces. The right limb is slightly darkened because the optical axes of the binoculars and camera were not perfectly aligned. Through the binoculars I could see more detail in all of the sunspots but the detail in the picture is noticeably lacking in the sunspots on the right hand side. This image is the area of sunspot complex 652. It is magnified about 4x from the size of the picture originally captured. The penumbra around the sunspots is very evident. The photograph is not resolving the granularity that was evident in the "surface" of the sun, particularly near the limb, so you can't see the area surrounding the penumbra where I was not detecting any granularity. Here is a SOHO satellite image of the sun taken a few minutes after my image.