The sun can surprise us any time. When I took this photo, the sun was on its way down from a solar maximum, but it was still showing signs of great activity. This large grouping of sun spots was causing a lot of activity amoung those who study the sun. There are many spots grouped together here and many bright bridges of solar material can be seen crossing over the spots.
I used Mira, my 9.8" f/4.63 Lurie-Houghton telescope, a Vernonscope 2.4X Barlow lens with 1.5" extension tube on the camera side of it, and a Philips ToUCam Pro web camera to take 30 second video images at 30 frames per second. The exposure time of the camera was set to 1/2500 of a second. I then used Registax and Photoshop to align, stack, and process the images. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 23 October 2003