Sunspots

I have a telescope with a solar filter, but since I bought it at solar minimum, there were no sunspots to see. Now that the sun is more active, I decided to try my hand at photographing them. It's harder than it looks. 

    First I had to find the sun. With the solar filter in place, the entire sky is black, with no hint of the sun until you're right on it. My finder scope is useless because it has no filter. Once I had the sun in view, I had to focus. If I'm not careful, touching the focus knob knocks the sun out of view and I have to find it again. 

    According to spaceweather.com, there are currently three groups of sunspots visible. I could see only one spot, so I swapped in a 2X Barlow, which meant I had to find the sun and focus again. Now I could see that the first spot was actually a group of two, and I could make out a second group. 

    I swapped the ocular for my CMOS camera, a SVBONY SV105. The bright ambient light washed out my laptop screen—I couldn't see anything. I put my jacket over my head and the laptop screen. Now I could see the screen, but not the telescope. The jacket over my head was not only uncomfortably warm, it caught the wind. The wind was so strong that at one point it tipped over my tripod, counterweight, telescope, camera, and all. 

    Of course, the earth continued to rotate, so I had to keep moving my telescope. The process for each photo: find the sun, focus, swap in my Barlow, focus, swap in my camera, focus, and, if I hadn't lost the sun again, shoot, otherwise, start over. I got six shots before I gave up for the day. This was the best:

I count four sunspots. Microscopy is sounding like a better hobby all the time.

I Spy With My Little Loupe, part 2

 Friends came for lunch on Sunday, and I pulled out my loupe and my phone to show them how I'd been taking photos with them. Their six year old daughter found this very interesting, so we took some photos together. She kept bringing me more things to photograph.

A dandelion leaf

A dandelion flower

A seed from that flower

 

A few strands of her hair

The tip of a pencil and some marks it made

A bit left by a pink rubber eraser

A dandelion stem

The base of the flower after she pulled all the seeds out

Ballpoint pen marks on paper

The tip of the pen

I Spy With My Little Loupe

After spending some time looking at the large and distant with binoculars and telescope, I thought I'd like to look at the small and near, especially when the planets, weather, and my work schedule fail to cooperate. 

After reading Microscopy as a Hobbby by Mol Smith, I decided to start with something even more basic: a 10x loupe. Another of Smith's books, I Spy with my Little Loupe,  helped me decide what to buy. It also gave tips on using my cell phone camera to take photos through my loupe. 

As I only have two hands, I found juggling my phone, loupe, and specimens awkward until I hit on the idea of using a steel cookie sheet as a work surface, and holding my loupe in place with magnets:

I used a sheet of printer paper as a background. My loupe's built-in LEDs provided reasonably good lighting.

What to look at first? Adventures with a Hand Lens by Richard Headstrom suggested looking at the paper itself:

It had a fine texture, but 10x magnification was enough to see the fibers. Next I tried a page of Headstrom's book. The texture was a bit courser, and when I zoomed in, I could see the ink had bled a little beyond the border of each printed letter.

I tried another book, this one with glossy pages. The texture was finer, with less ink bleeding.

I zoomed in on a photo of a daisy in the same book. The ink in the photo made a woven pattern distinct from the fibers of the paper.

I didn't have a newspaper handy, so I tried a bit of paper towel. Much coarser fibers, and a pattern of dots embossed in it:

Headstrom suggested cloth. Here are the fibers of a knit shirt, lit from behind:

An eggshell was disappointing, mostly because its curves made it hard to hold everything still and focus. Next I tried ground coffee:

Ground coffee made me think of ground pepper, which turned out to be more colorful than I expected:

Pepper suggested salt. Its crystals were transparent cubes:

I wondered if sea salt crystals would look different. Its crystals seemed to be larger and more rectangular:

MSG had long, thin crystals. I couldn't determine the cross-sectional shape at this magnification.

Not surprisingly, kosher salt had larger crystals:

Rock salt, by comparison, looked like boulders:

I decided to try other seasonings. Onion powder:

Garlic powder:

Ground cinnamon:

Chili powder:

 

Thyme:

A pleasant Sunday afternoon, all told.