The Sun on the 15th of August 2024 imaged in white light.

" When you spend many a dark night trying to capture the faint light from stars light years away in the Universe, it is easy to forget that we live just 93 million miles away from our nearest star. The Sun is currently approaching 'solar maximum' and consequently has many sunspot groups rotating across its very bright solar disc (Photosphere).

Please do not stare at the Sun and NEVER point a telescope or binoculars at the Sun because at the very least you will permanently damage your sight.

Our instrumentation engineer, Jolene McSquint-Fleming, constructed the solar white light filters we use, which are sized to fit in front of the telescope objective lens. The video clips for the above images were  captured  using the Jodrell Plank Observatory's smallest telescope, the 66mm Altair Astro Lightwave ED refractor. The specialist video camera used was a QHY5-111462c. Between the telescope and the camera we positioned a Hydrogen Alpha pass filter and a Meade 4000 red filter No23A. Several one minute duration SER video clips were captured. The clips were stacked using AS!3 software to create still images from the best video frames. The data was then processed using Registax6, Affinity Photo2 and AstroSharp.

The large sunspot group shown in the above images is Sunspot Group 3784. A sunspot appears dark because it is at a lower temperature than the surrounding photosphere. It is also an area of concentrated magnetic activity. To provide scale, it is safe to say, that the largest spot in group 3784 could easily swallow the planet Earth!

If you look carefully at the widefield images above, you might notice the brighter spots and lines in the photosphere, which appear to link the sunspots. These features are most evident towards the solar limb (Sun's edge). They are called 'solar faculae'. Solar faculae are bright spots in the photosphere that form in the canyons between solar granules, short-lived convection cells several thousand kilometres across that constantly form and dissipate over timescales of several minutes. Faculae are produced by concentrations of magnetic field lines". Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.