Sun Picture from My New Solar Telescope

There is going to be an annular solar eclipse on May 20th that will be visible in a narrow pathway that covers part of Eastern Asia and the Western United States. The eclipse will be seen as a partial eclipse over a much greater region of the World. I live in Redding, California, which luckily happens to be right in the center of the path, giving a perfect ring of fire effect during the peak of the eclipse.

Because of this, I decided I had to buy a solar telescope and produce a time-lapse video of the eclipse. It's taken me a few days to figure out how to take decent pictures with it, but here is my first decent picture. In it you can see the very large sunspot that has been talked about in the news the last couple of days. Click on the image to enlarge.

If you want to download this picture in full resolution or in a number of resolutions appropriate for wallpapers on various devices, including iPhones, iPods, etc., you can visit the astrophotography page on my photography website.  

For those who wish to know more of the technical details, the telescope is a Meade Coronado SolarMax II 60 Double Stack with a 400mm focal length. I used a Barlow lens to extend that focal length to 800mm so it would take up most of the frame on my Panasonic GH2.