1612-Today

Before the invention of the telescope, the Sun was thought to be a perfect disk.   However as soon as telescopes became available, astronomers turned them to the Sun.   They discovered two things.  Sunspots and blindness.  Not the great scientist Galileo though, he was far too clever and sensible.   He observed only at sunset and sunrise and by projecting the light onto a screen rather than trying to look through the telescope itself.   He drew his results very carefully. 

Above is one of Galileo's drawings of sunspots from the summer of 1612. Click on his drawing to go to a website about his studies.

Above is a shot taken with a Meade ETX 70AT beginner telescope and a scopetronics white light filter.

As the Sun is 110 times as wide as the Earth most of the sunspots we can see with a small telescope are bigger than our planet.   Although sunspots look dark it is only by comparison to the blinding light from the rest of the photosphere.  The dark region of the sunspot is still about 10 times brighter than the full Moon.

Sunspots are created by magnetic loops bursting out from the Sun's interior.

There is still a lot we don't know about sunspots so they are being closely studied by scientists using both space and ground based telescopes.   They are carrying on an adventure of discovery started by Galileo nearly four hundred years ago.

Below is an image taken with the new Swedish Institute for Solar Physics telescope on La Palma.  It is the best image of sunspots taken so far.  If you click the picture it will enlarge.

Photo credit: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences