Maxscope Safety, care and instructions
Suppliers of Sunspotters in the UK
Nice people!
UK importers of Coronado telescopes
NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN THROUGH BINOCULARS OR A TELESCOPE UNLESS IT HAS A SPECIAL SOLAR FILTER PROPERLY FITTED. FAILURE TO HEED THIS WARNING COULD LEAD TO PERMANENT BLINDNESS.
The main instrument that we have used for imaging is a Coronado Maxscope 40mm hydrogen alpha filtered solar telescope. It is probably the most accurately manufactured piece of equipment in any school in the World. This little telescope has received ecstatic reviews from amateur astronomers worldwide. Until a few years ago, observing the Sun at 656.3nm was for the professionals only. The filters had narrow temperature tolerances and were ferociously expensive. The Maxscope retails at about £1500 in the UK (not including a mount).
However, Coronado has now brought out an even less expensive Ha telescope - the PST. This retails at about £600 including a table-top mount and hard case. We have used these instruments and purchased them for school loan clubs in the UK and South Africa. They are excellent for viewing the Sun.
Coronado PST hydrogen alpha filtered solar telescope: Open PST pictorialinstruction sheet (170kB Word doc)
H alpha explained (kB Word doc)
The Maxscope is tuned to 656.28nm with a bandwidth of only 0.07nm. The tolerances are four times finer than those of the Hubble Space telescope! Click here to find out more.
The dial on the side of the filter allows the wavelength to be slightly adjusted to compensate for the Doppler shift. When it is tuned to see features coming out of the edge of the solar disk it will not reveal so much detail of material being ejected in an earthward direction.
Having a good mount is vital for this scope. We settled for a Manfrotto tripod and a combination of a Uniloc ball and socket head, which allows first alignment, and a Celestron slow-motion head, to allow us to keep the Sun in the field of view. This all proved too lightweight for the telescope and a problem to keep aligned when a whole class wanted to see. So we replaced it with an HEQ5 powered head on a dedicated tripod.
The images above (click for detail) give an indication of the view through our Hα filter although the prominences, easy to see visually, are challenging to capture photographically.
Recording the spectacular features of the Sun's Chromosphere with a digital camera is a technical challenge that will be relished by the more advanced members of the Astronomy Club. The Sunspotters make recording the features of the Photosphere easy and safe. Just clip a piece of paper on the board and point the lens in the general direction the Sun. Shadow marks make lining up a doddle. A few marks to fix the position of the Sun on the paper and you can then draw around the sunspots. The Sun is a hundred and ten times wider than the Earth, so most of the sunspots you will see are bigger than our planet. Don't forget to write down the date and the time. That way you can go to the SOHO site later on and down load Ultraviolet images taken at about the same time. By recording the sunspots for a week you will be able to show how the Sun rotates. Current UK price is £285 (January 06)
Learning Technologies Sunspotter projector solar telescope:Instruction sheet (Word doc 67kB)
