Observing the sun: Completing the A. L. Sunspotter Club

by Jane Houston Jones

I've been a solar tourist for almost ten years now, ever since I made my first dobsonian solar telescope in John Dobson's telescope making class in San Francisco. Anyway, with some time on my hands (while looking for a job), I recently sketched the sun every day and completed the Astronomical League Sunspotter Club program. A couple weeks of clouds in January gave me the time to scan the drawings, tif them, Photoshop 6 them, jpg them and finally html them. :-)

I began my daily drawings on October 12 and that turned out to be a good day to start the program. I counted 9 active regions and 26 spots. Of course, there were a lot more than that on that day, and with practice I was able to see and record more and more detail. Active region 0137 was rotating off the solar disk on my first day of observing and active region 0221 was rotating on the solar disk on my las day of the 60 day program. That's alot of solar activity to sketch!

I ordered the "Observe and Understand the Sun" booklet from the Astronomical League, and that gave me plenty of guidance for the program, so many thanks to Rik Hill for editing this valuable resource. Rik is the moderator of the ALPO Solar e-group, and works at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona. I wrote an article about my first month's progress for the San Jose Astronomical League club newsletter. I titled it "A month of sun days" and it is here: http://ephemeris.sjaa.net/0212/b.html

So I continued through the program and finished it on December 12th, the day before we went on holiday. I turned in the paperwork - all those sketches - to the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers AL coordinator, along with the documentation for five other AL award programs. When we returned from holiday in January I started scanning the drawings and I finally finished the website last night.

Here it is: http://www.whiteoaks.com/sketches/alsunspotter.html

My reason for making the drawings accessible on my sketching web page is to encourage others, especially those new to astronomy, to observe and draw what they see. I hope this inspires some to complete the AL Sunspotter Club program, or to observe the sun regularly or even occasionally if they don't already. Even the smallest or least expensive telescope, with proper filters, can produce a month of sun days.

Information about the AL Sunspotter Club observing program can be found here: http://www.astroleague.org/al/obsclubs/sunspot/sunsptcl.html