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Originally posted by sensfan
What you are seeing in those pics is two fold. I assume the first you already know.
1 - The pics appear to be taken with a digital camera, possibly a web camera. Digital cams use a ccd which can suffer from "ccd burnout" when imaging very bright object, such as the sun. This causes the dark part, or purple in the images.
Originally posted by sensfan
2 - The odds shape you see in the november photo is due to the cloud cover when the image was taken. The clouds that are directly in front of the sun and thos around it's parimeter from the prospective of the camera will "take on" the light of the sun..or be illuminated from the back by the sun, causing them to be very bright as well. These clouds that are brightly illuminated cause ccd burnout as well.
Originally posted by Off_The_Street
I think if you have a digital camera and stretch some aluminized mylar across the lens, you will have a better chance of seeing the sun's disc.
If it's still too bright, you could try two layers of aluminized mylar. If you have a zoom lens or a telephoto ( I have a telephoto adapter to 230 mm 135 equivalent) you might be able to see some sunspots, especially if you set the quality of the picture to, say, 1500 X 2000 pixels and crop that bad boy. I'll try it this afternoon and see what I can come up with.
Remember, there are always benefits to doing this kind of science. In this case, I get the joy of spreading knowledge, some extra ATS geekpoints, and, since I have no aluminized mylar available, will have to go out and get some of those mylar-wrapped toaster pastry thingies -- the Pop-tarts.
Hey, it's for Science!