While recovering after a minor operation last week, and the sun actually being visible, I was looking for something in the garage and came across the tripod off my Sky-Watcher SolarQuest Solar Go-To mount, so there was only one thing to do. So I quickly set up the SolarQuest in the front garden, it aligned at first attempt again (as it has every time I’ve used it) and quickly popped the Lunt LS60THa/B1200CPT 60mm scope in with a Lunt zoom eyepiece, did 30 minutes of visual.

After realising the solar scope has probably been sat for over a year in its case, I had to totally depressurise the tuner and re-pressurise before I could visually get any detail on the surface. Nice to see a few nice prominences but still very little surface detail.

After about 20 minutes our postman arrived and had a 5 minute look, then a couple of neighbours who where all impressed and surprised what the sun looked like through a telescope. One neighbour wouldn’t look through as he remembered that as a boy (which was a long time ago) he was told never to look at the sun through a telescope, but he eventually too had a look.

So a relatively successful morning. I unfortunately didn’t have the time (or energy) to set any cameras up, but all the gear is easy to hand now ready for the next opportunity. It’s amazing, the first time I used this equipment in the open planned front of the house and the number of people around who where interested – I’ll have to do it more often.

Here’s a quick phone pic of the setup as I couldn’t just do visual, there had to be an image somewhere 🙂

Steve