Observing sunspots with a telescope

My inspiration for this blog post came when I went to my local planetarium and one of the staff showed me the planetarium telescope and projected the sun on to a blank piece of paper and he showed me the sun spots. So I thought I could do the same thing with my telescope.

But what are sunspots anyway? They are temporary, dark areas on the Sun's visible surface that are cooler than its surroundings due to intense magnetic fields inhibiting the flow of heat from the Sun's interior.

But let me tell you, observing them has its challenges:  

WARNING: NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN WITH YOUR TELESCOPE!!!

• The first challenge, since you can not look at the sun directly is, correctly orienting it to point at the sun. The solution I have thought of to solve this problem is when your telescope is pointing at the sun is that you should only see the circumference of the front part of the telescope on the wall like in this picture.

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• My second tip, since you can not look at the sun directly is, to project it on to a white piece of paper.

• My third piece of advice, is to create a shade like in the photo below to prevent interference on the paper from the sunlight. Tip: make sure that is tight fit around the telescope so that no light interferes.

When I took this photo there were more spots on the southern hemisphere, but also some smaller ones on the northern one.

Since I was doing this project I decided to do some research on the sun. Here are you have some fun facts I learnt:

• Did you know that the solar cycle is a 11 year cycle of increasing and decreasing activity on the Sun's surface. We just had the top of the cycle. That's why I could see so many sunspots. In 5 years there will be none.

• Size can be deceiving. Some of these spots are actually larger than planet Earth.

• Sunspots are linked to solar radiation. Solar radiation can cause technological disruption, health risks to astronauts and airline passengers. However, on the positive side solar radiation can cause beautiful auroras.

• The Sun rotates on itself due to the conservation of angular momentum from the gas cloud it formed from. As a giant cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form the Sun, any initial spin it had was passed on, causing it to rotate. The Sun's rotation is unique because it is a ball of plasma and doesn't rotate as a solid body; its equator spins faster than its poles, a phenomenon known as differential rotation. The equator rotates every 30 days. The poles every 25.

• The outermost part of the sun is called the corona. The corona is kind of like the suns atmosphere. Did you know that the sun's corona is actually hotter than the sun surface? In fact much, much hotter. The corona is about 2 million degrees but the surface is only 6000C.

• The Parker solar probe is a NASA spacecraft launched in 2018 designed to explore the sun's outer corona and the origins of the solar wind. Its mission is still ongoing. Fun fact: it keeps getting faster and faster every time it goes around the sun. It is already the fastest ever human created vehicle.