Sun Spots

I have seen photos of sun spots many a times on the internet and magazines and always wanted to shoot these myself. Setting sun my otherwise weakness, I usually sit on my terrace and shoot as many photos as possible, but never the sun spots. However, a few days back, I found the sun quite dark orange and started taking shots hoping to finds some spots. I strained my Sony DSC H2 camera to its maximum optical zooms at tele-lens mode (although I do not have a tele converter). And wow!! This time I was lucky. I found two tiny spots as shown above.

Sunspots appear temporarily on the surface of the sun as burst of very high energy, reaching temperatures in the range of 2,727–4,227 °C. Since the sun itself is very bright, these could only be viewed on a fading sun, as I did. Sunspots expand and contract as they move across the surface of the Sun and can be as large as 80,000 kilometers (49,710 mi) in diameter, making the larger ones visible from Earth. They may also travel at speeds up to 100 mph across the suns photosphere.

Photo: Jalalspages (Flickr)