The mid-day sun in October 2011, as seen through a Meade ETX-80 telescope, using a Baader AstroSolar safety film over the telescope objective and a Neximage CCD Imager (coupled to a focal reducer) to capture the video. Despite being a cloudy day (this IS England!), the sun spot activity can be clearly seen - 3 large ones on the left and at least one small one in the middle. Midway in the video, you'll also be able to see the vapour trail left by a passing aircraft as its blown by the wind!
Detach the reducer lens and stick on a 2X Barlow lens, and you'll be able to zoom in on the action in the sunspots. The dark core (umbra) and lighter filamentary outer region (penumbra) are clearly visible. At the beginning of the video, three much smaller sunspots can be seen to the left of the large ones and another smaller sunspot can be seen to the right near the end. Ignore the two or three 'dust bunnies' on the video (blobs of dirt on the imaging chip that do not move with the passage of the sun).
Detach the reducer lens and stick on a 2X Barlow lens, and you'll be able to zoom in on the action in the sunspots. The dark core (umbra) and lighter filamentary outer region (penumbra) are clearly visible. At the beginning of the video, three much smaller sunspots can be seen to the left of the large ones and another smaller sunspot can be seen to the right near the end. Ignore the two or three 'dust bunnies' on the video (blobs of dirt on the imaging chip that do not move with the passage of the sun).
I took a few still images a few days later, below:
And, to verify my results, below is the equivalent satellite picture from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) at http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/ . I suspect they used slightly more expensive equipment than I did ;)
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