João Porto (j.porto@mail.telepac.pt)

Tom Harnish (katetom@znet.com)
Bought one of Scopetronix digital camera mounts and with a minimum of fooling around grabbed the attached picture of the sun. Taken 9/4 with Nikon Coolpix 900 using eyepiece projection with a Meade 20mm. Figure it's not too bad for no fuss no muss first crack at astrophotography

Dr Thomas A Clark (W3IWI) (tac@clark.net)
Hi Mike -- been watching your site silently for a while. Since it is a hot (98F=37C) & hazy July 4th holiday in the Balto/Wash area, I thought I'd see what the sun looks like. Attached is a photo I snapped today. Telescope: ETX-90EC with 1.1m Autostar sitting on Meade's tabletop tripod legs on my back porch. Solar Filter: Thousand Oaks full aperture (which accounts for the orange color). Camera: Logitech QuickCam USB (the ~$70 version that looks like an over-sized black golfball) running as TWAIN device on laptop at 480x640 pixels. The TWAIN driver snaps a big .BMP file, which was converted to JPEG , text added and contrast adjusted with CPIC32(available as shareware from http://www.photodex.com). The camera is mounted in a fitting made from ~ $2 of ABS plastic pipe fittings & adapttors. It slips over the standard 26 mm eyepiece (after removing the rubber eyepiece) and yields ~0.5 x 0.7 degree field-of-view. Meade's "Don't look at the sun" logon message on the Autostar is a pain. I guess everyone knows that hitting the [5] key will stop it at any time without the need to see it scroll thru the text. In our highly litigious society, I can understand their need for consumer protection, but I sure wish that the Sun was included in the [Solar System] list. Here are some tricks for other sun watchers: a. Pick [Mercury] as your GoTo target and then offset to the sun. This will get you close in both position and tracking rate. b. To make pointing easier, look at the shadow the telescope makes on the ground. It's easy to center the shadow of the telescope's tube and the el/dec support brackets to get within a few arc minutes. For me this is necessary because I don't have a filter on the finder scope and don't want to fry my eye!

William R Woodard (wrwoodard@compuserve.com)
The sunspot image was taken through a Casio QV11B digital camera, automatic exposure, afocal to the ETX with the meade Super Plossl 26mm in place, shot through a Orion solar filter.

Yiannis Dedoussis (dedousis@prometheus.hol.gr)

Joao Porto (j.porto@mail.telepac.pt)

Joao Porto (j.porto@mail.telepac.pt)

Joao Porto (j.porto@mail.telepac.pt)

Paul J. Boudreaux (boudreau@eng.umd.edu)
These sun spot pictures were made with the ETX and a Thousand Oaks Solar II Plus filter using the prime focus and a Connectix QuickCam Digital CCD Color Camera. I used the Meade T-Mount with a special T-Adapter that I made to fit the Connectix Color Camera. I removed the camera lens and the color balance filter in the camera and used the prime focus and the Connectix QuickCam software to capture the attached images. This method is at the mercy of the fixed magnification of the ETX/Connectix camera configuration. I used both attachment components of the T-Mount to get the longest focal distance. The exposures were preset by the QuickCam software in the Automatic mode. They show the lower right quadrant of the sun with the only sunspot showing on Sunday, October 5 at about 3 p.m. EST. I was quite pleased with the Thousand Oaks filter's performance. This inexpensive light weight color CCD camera is capable of some quite good photographs. This was my first attempt at CCD imaging with the ETX and I was not disappointed.

Philip Hutcherson (Philiph540@aol.com)
I think this may be the first Sun pic on your fine web site. Particulars: Prime Focus, 1/250sec, ISO 200 FujiColor. This was taken a few moments before sunset. In other photos taken just before this one, a sunspot is visible.