Solarscope (new toy)

Yay, my new solarscope's come!

It felt like Christmas! I opened the box with Miss Brett and, together we assembled the parts ( it didn't take long, the instructions were quite straightforward). Luckily (amazingly!) the sun was shining and it took even shorter time to work out how to use it. Having struggled with getting a good image with the binoculars (which was quite a lot of faffing around covering one eyepiece, clamping it in a stand and trying to line it up with the sun without looking through it [warning: you should never, ever look at the sun either with or without binoculars/telescope, as you could blind yourself or severely damage your eyes!]

So, here's the solarscope set up and ready to go:

So, what's a Solarscope?

A Solarscope, like a Sunspotter, allows you to look at features of the sun safely. For instance, you could look at planets (Mercury or Venus) transiting (crossing) the sun's disc, or you could watch the progress of a solar eclipse. What I most wanted it for, though, was to look at sun spots - small, slightly cooler spots on the sun's surface, which appear to move as the sun turns.

We quickly found that the Solarscope gave us a good image of the sun, and I saw my first ever sunspots (whenever I'd looked before I hadn't seen any)

The sun's rays travelled through the telescopic part on the front, hitting the small concave mirror at the back, to be focused inside the box:

We saw what appeared to be three sunspots (but were probably four, with the middle two looking like one big one, since they usually come in pairs):



Light clouds came over at this point, but we were still able to see the sunspots:

A few hours later (13.44) we took another photo to compare the sunspots, and they seemed to have shifted a bit...(they don't seem to line up on such a slant...)



Although a proper Sunspotter is quite expensive, and difficult to find in this country, we have asked Mr Chantler, technology, if he might have a go at making us one...so possibly we might have one of those in the future. But, in the meantime, this solarscope will keep us going... :-)