| MadSci Network: Astronomy |
Hi, Vyom Upadhya! You CAN safely observe sunspots, either with a telescope or without, *if you're very careful*! And I can't think of a better spot than Broward County, Florida to do it from either! (Plenty of sun!)
*** Anyway, the MOST IMPORTANT THINGS TO REMEMBER are: *** ** NEVER EVER ** LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN!! *** ALWAYS HAVE ADULT SUPERVISION WHEN PROJECTING THE SUN'S IMAGE!As long as you remember this, you can safely observe sunspots. In fact, people have been doing it for hundreds of years now for just the reason you want to: to measure the sun's rotation! The way you do it is by using a telescope - or if you don't have a small telescope, a "pinhole camera" - to PROJECT the sun's image onto a piece of clean white paper.
Just hold the piece of paper in your hand, or on a clipboard or notebook if you have one handy. Then use the telescope's shadow (again DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN YOURSELF) to point the telescope at the sun. Then put the piece of paper about a foot from the telescope's eyepiece. Look for the disk of the sun on your white sheet of paper - the scope may take some moving around to get the line-up right - and then use your telescope's focus knobs to make the sun's disk SHARP.
If you don't have access to a telescope, just get a shoebox, and poke a nice, even hole in one end of it. Put this hole toward the sun, and you should see the sun's image projected onto the other side of the shoebox.
By projecting the image, you can see the sun as a full disk, and all the bigger sunspots will be visible as black "specks" in little groups on that disk. Two more things to keep in mind for your project though:
1. Unlike the Earth, the sun is NOT a solid object. The polar areas of the sun actually rotate at different rates than the sun's equator.
2. We are very close to the sun's lowest period of activity in the big 11 year "solar cycle". This means that for the next year or two, you'll have to look every day for many days running to see many sunspots. Often, you'll look at the sun and see NO spots at all!
Last but NOT LEAST, be sure to HAVE YOUR PARENTS' SUPERVISION before trying any of these ideas! After all, the sun is exciting to watch, but it's also VERY DANGEROUS! Through even a tiny telescope, the sun's image shining directly on your eye would blind you almost instantly!
Have fun and good luck,
Lew Gramer