The sky was covered with patches of clouds everywhere, yet i tried to have first shots from the new Astrozap solar filter. The new filter was much better designed to fit on the front of the telescope, with three screws attached, the fit was in just a few seconds.

First i used my 25 mm eyepice at the back of the scope and the visual views were not bad but so very detailed since the earth clouds were moving across the surface of the sun. But the two sunspots and three tiny ones were clearly visible.

Then i attached DMK21 camera and shot an AVI of about 20,000 images. Quickly processed it with AVIStack and Registax and here is the final image, my first from the new filter!

I am happy to see the individual granules on the surface of the sun which i could not have seen with the Lunt60 Halpha solar scope previously. Solar granule is a small bubble in the image below and typically is around a thousand kilometer wide.. that's about the distance from Lahore to Karachi! The bright part is where the hot material is coming up on the surface and the dark boundary is where it is falling down again. These granules are the convection zones on the sun's surface.

The big sunspot in the middle is quite small when you see it on the solar disk here. I very roughly figured the size of this whole sunspot to be about 40 granules, so that would make it to be around 40,000 km wide. Thats like three times the size of our planet Earth. Sun is huge!