As luck would have it, skies cleared here in Park City and I got word (via Spaceweather.com) that there was a nice prominence visible on the Sun. I figured I’d take a few minutes out of a busy morning to see what all the fuss was about. Wow! What a sweet view. Not one, but two prominences jumped right out at me. Sweet! I enjoyed the view for a while and then decided that this was simply too nice not to be imaged.

This was my first success at imaging through the new scope, a Coronado Solar Max 40 solar telescope.  I’d had a couple of failed attempts previously. It seems that I need a bit more back focus than I was getting. I kept fiddling with this until I got to focus. I had to have the eyepiece pulled half way out of the diagonal before the image got sharp. I’ll pull together some sort of tube extender for my next effort. Anyway, I was quite happy to see that this actually came out close to what I was able to observe. I say close, because there was a bunch of detail on the surface of the Sun that did not appear in my image. As my target was the prominence, this wasn’t too big of a deal, but… going forward, I’ll need to get this resolved as well.

Astro Photo Details:

* Designation: The Sun
* Magnitude: roughly mag -27 * Size: roughly 1/2*

Astro Photo Processing Details

* Sony DSC-F717 Digital Camera
* 1/50s at ISO200
*PhotoShop CS2 Levels (mac version)
* Coronado Solar Max 40 Solar Telescope