John, thanks for the heads-up! Clouds all day finally parted enough for my wife and I to grab a five-minute peek in white light. Big sunspot! Not the largest single spot I've seen, but definitely top-ten size. If you dropped the earth in that spot, it would be nothing but net! Hopefully the clouds clear a bit tomorrow and I can set up the H-a scope. On 4/9/16, John M. Craig <jmcraig@xmission.com> wrote:

Hi Folks,

If you have the Ha or white-light solar gear, this one is definitely worth a look--the thing is impressively big. I'm guessing it might be visible w/o magnification, but I am stuck doing taxes so haven't taken the time to check (as the clouds close in). It looks like it should be visible tomorrow also. In Ha, there's a lot going on around the sunspot also--interesting filaments, plages, and such. I haven't had a chance to check in white light, but I imagine that'd be great too.

Another good show as the solar cycle wanes. Today I had a chance to check out this still-enlarging spot in Ha and white light--both through my C102 and Thousand Oaks filter and unmagnified also through a Thousand Oaks filter (they have them that come in little cards that you just hold up--very nice for passing around if you're doing a sun-viewing party, BTW--much easier than the pseudo-glasses kind). It seems to me that the main spot is less circular than it was this morning and a bit harder to see w/o magnification, but still definitely there. In Ha, the area around it continues to show signs of a lot of twisting and tangling in the magnetic field and was interesting to see at a pretty wide range of etalon tuning settings. In white light, you can see more detail in the shape of the sunspot and the penumbra has a lot of texture to it (the highest power I tried on it was ~130x--lot of heat waves at this time of day). So, regardless of what kind of solar gear you have, it's definitely worth a look; who knows when we'll get another one this interesting. If you don't have any gear, try projection! (I've taken some pictures with my rather lame, hold-the-camera-up-to-the-eyepiece method, if they're reasonable--gotta do some work before having a good look, I'll post links to them.) Fun stuff! John