The line between amateur and professional in astronomy has been blurring for many years.  Perhaps it is blurriest when observing the sun.  The equipment available to amateurs rivals any equipment a professional would have at his/her disposal, but probably the more important is the amount of time spent actually observing.  Lowell Lyon purchased a Lunt solar observing system, 4" f7, single and double stacked.  It recently arrived and today he set up the single stack system in his back yard on his Meade goto refractor tripod with a 5mm Pentax eyepiece.  When he looked through the eyepiece for the first time he saw an incredible number of prominenc es.  He called and invited me over to share the view.  I am close to speechless   It was extraordinary. The downside is we had to keep pushing the ra and dec buttons on the tripod, cause, silly Lowell, hadn't polar aligned in broad daylight, but  OMG oodness.  THE VIEW! !   There were EIGHT  prominences on one edge   of the sun.  One was the classical loop structure seen in spectacular professional photos.  Over the length of 45 minutes, you could see the loop dissipate.  Another spike disappeared altogether.  THEN he looked at the opposite edge of the sun, almost a full 180 from the prominences we were observing.  and HOLY COW , once again, knock your socks off.  If the loop was spectacular, the prominence on the other edge was phenomenal, mind-blowing,  We tried to figure out how many earths would fit end to end in the structure.  I'm only guessing 7-10 .  It wasn't a loop, it was "solid" gaseous material extending well away from the surface.  There were a couple of holes in the material (probable close to Mars size) .  There was another prominence, two-pronged, "nearby."  Between the two was a sharp spike that dis appeared while we were observing.  Another smaller spike appeared nearby    The surface detail around a single sunspot visible  showed, for lack of a proper word, phlanges, curving away from the spot.   All in all a rare view .  Look for Lowell at future sun parties (now he has to go hehehe).  I have a whole new appreciation for solar observing and have an inkling as to what Chuck means when he talks about his double stack Coronado(?) system.