solar observing with Katrina (Suffern)

Katrina sent me several text messages to my mobile phone but unfortunately I didn't get them. At 12:50 PM, she messaged "Come out now! Solar area." By a weird coincidence, I just happened to walk by the courtyard and saw her. She energetically signaled me over!

1:32 PM. Some wispy clouds were making perihelic effects in the sky. There was a nearly complete prismatic circle around the Sun, 22° out. A nice fringe benefit for the solar observing crew.

She then lead me to various telescopes. The local astronomy club was quite active. There were about 20 stations set up.

Viewed the Sun in Hα in a little Coronado telescope, one of the old units, before the PST was invited. Nice view.

1:44. The arc was bright...

Katrina was most impressed with the small spectroscope. It was a Shelyak Instruments Lhires Lite visual device, a small little thing, that showed a portion of the spectrum of the Sun. And then she showed me how to adjust the part of the spectrum observed with the dial on the side. Fascinating.

All the way from deep red to dark violet. Wow. What a neat way to look at our star. I didn't know which dark line was which (other than hydrogen alpha in the red and calcium K in the dark blue) but it was obvious the various absorption lines.

1:55. Then we headed over to a long refractor to with a DayStar filter wheel attached. The guide let me adjust the filter position. There were familiar views, with the 0.3 ångström and 0.7 ångström filters, like Coronado hydrogen α filters. But the 0.7 was different. I loved the detail it revealed. Unprecedented detail, I could see magnetic loops right down to the sunspot regions. Incredible. There was also a Sodium Na- D line filter which provided a somewhat natural colour to the Sun but with detail on the surface. And finally a unique Calcium filter, not K line, but a light cyan colour. However, I forgot the details of the filter. That was a treat too, a very nice setup.

In fact, I was impressed with the way the astronomy club ran this event. In a lot of ways, like what RASC does. What really caught my eye was the sign boards. Almost every telescope had a sign board beside. I thought this a great idea and we could do this too, easily. It was a great way to tell people what they'd see, provide some scientific information, answer some common questions, etc., while in a queue for the eyepiece. Katrina liked them too.

I was pretty happy that I stumbled outside at this time!