Here comes the sun (spots and all)

Hello again world. Long time, no write!I thought it was time I reactivated my blog as there's work to do, thread posts to re-ignite and complete and a world of interest to be writing about again! Where have I been? Well, around the time I last posted, I became a parent  and life became a metaphorical timey-wimey wormhole for my free, available time. Here I am resurfacing on the other side of the wormhole (and what a ride it has been!).

And what has brought me back today? Well, the autumn evening sun tonight attracted me to fix the long lens to my digital SLR and take a few shots as the Sun sank towards the western horizon, as seen from western Stirling in Scotland, UK, thus:

Quite attractive - but wait, what are those dotty, spotty things on the sun?

Yes, looks like sunspots - I've never managed to photograph sunspots before, so I was quite excited!

Sunspots but perhaps you can't quite make them out so...

I went and checked online - there are now some great websites showing the activity on the sun in near-real time. I went to NASA's SOHO site - for their Solar and Heliotrophic Observatory - here - which showed this entry for the sun today:

Sunspot activity for today, 10th September

And with not very much squinting and little need for imagination, you can see two of the larger spots, numbers 2157 and 2158, ringed in the following copy of my photo:

Sunspots

Yippee - now all I need to do is find out how, safely, to take much crisper images of the Sun (and to find out how to make my photos show the colour of the Sun - the actual Sun I was looking at was a deep red - not the yellow colour it looks here). I'm afraid I am a  bit of a lazy point-and-press merchant. I fear I need to read the manual for my SLR.  Anyway, a fine end to a lovely day and one with a bit of added scientific excitement.

And what are sunspots? Read this from Wikipedia.

Hubba hubba Hubble!

(This is the kind of post I would expect to see over on e-clecticism, so hopefully jono will forgive me for this parking of scooters on his lawn!)

So, the magnificent Hubble telescope is 20 years old. For me, the Hubble and the images it produces of deep space (and, hence, the distant past) are one of the Wonders of the Modern World. A truly extraordinary technological and scientific feat. The Grauniad newspaper (ok, The Guardian) has an excellent and interesting narrated slideshow (from yesterday) about Hubble and its discoveries here. Apologies that you have to follow a link, but there didn't seem to be an option to embed the article (and I'm ham-fisted about this stuff, if it isn't obvious). But go on, have a look, and gawp, open-mouthed, at the deep space pictures produced by this massive peeping tube in space. It is staggeringly difficult to comprehend the spatial scale of some of these structures in deep space, when the narrator says something about the little blobs on one image being of the order of a light year across.





Screen dump from the Guardian website (Copyright: The Guardian)

 
And if you really like these views of deep space, you can see much, much more here, on the NASA Hubble site.



Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI