By Rachel Dutton – Outreach Officer
Reporting from Guildford High Street
We kicked off astronomy season with International Space Week on 5th October as part of the Institute of Physics and University of Surrey’s High Street take over. Celebrating space and astronomy, there was a pop up planetarium, space music, talks on asteroids, dark matter and galaxies, rovers and various satellites being launched by students. GAS were invited to bring out scopes.
Starting in the morning we were focussed on distant scenery, but once the Sun was in view, we were on track for solar observing. Whilst you never want to look at the sun normally, we do have specially adapted scopes and optics for safely observing the sun. We got these lovely images in white light, where you can see sunspots that caused aurora.
Solar Images taken with Seestar S50 & solar filter.
If you look carefully you can also see the granulation pattern on the Sun as it is boiling, and limb darkening which means it is getting darker around the edges. This is because the sun is not a solid so you can see through it more at the edges or the limb and see the space behind it. If you look along the limb, you will also see brighter patches too called faculae. They are everywhere on the surface, but are easier to find towards the limb.
You can find out more about how sun spots are formed and cause aurora in this blog post.
We think we had around 500 people look through our scopes and in one of the pictures, you can see our handmade heat shield made of wrapping paper, as the Sun really heated things up. It was a great start to the astronomy season, and we hope to see you at some of our outreach events soon.
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