Was at HFCC near the science building in their courtyard for solar observing Saturday

Chatted with Tim Campbell on the phone and mentioned it would be nice to do some solar observing. He mentioned he was busy at the HFCC planetarium giving a presentation, but that he thought about taking out his solar setup and doing solar outreach.

The problem was, he'd need someone to watch the setup while he was giving the presentation. I wanted to compare the new Hershel wedge on the solar setup Tim uses against my Vixen binocular telescope with dual filters.

I've seen at times really great detail with two eyes on the 80mm binoculars when using safe solar filters, I wondered now the twin 80mm would compare to a single 101mm view of the Tele Vue NP101 is.

With the Herschel wedge supposedly giving great views, it would be interesting to see if I could match the detail of the Herschel wedge.

We started looking around 2:15pm. James French joined us and brought his four inch telescope with a Baader planetarium filter on it.

We looked at the sunspots and also at solar flares though Tim's wonderful 80mm lunt solar telescope.

The views from the Hershel wedge were stunning. Many details could be seen. Tim had a zoom eyepiece from Lunt on the rig and it was already zoomed in to the highest power when I first looked at the sun.

I started to count sunspots in one group on Tim's setup. I counted at least 30 sunspots in the large group. But I knew there were some I missed because they were so small or I wasn't keeping track of the place I left off counting. There were likely forty sunspots in a small area.

When I looked through the vixen telescope the view was nice and pleasant, but it was no where near the view or detail of the Lunt Herschel wedge. I could perhaps make out half as many sunspots but. I was using a lower power than Tim's rig was using. I tried higher powered eyepieces and still found that it was difficult to get the sunspots in sharp focus for some reason.

The Hershel wedge won the shootout big time. It was far more pleasing of an image and I hoped to get a nice Tmounted shot of the sun to show what that telescope could do. Unfortunately with the filter and tmount I had I could not get the setup to go into focus.

I shot a few photos through the eyepiece which is called AFOCAL. Photography. This worked but the detail just wasn't the detail I was seeing in the telescope.

Below are some photos of the HFCC event.

Two young FAAC student members showed up as well.




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