With all the really nice weather we have been having lately, this was a good opportunity to get out with the scope and do a little solar observing and drawing. Rather than just concentrate on one single highly detailed drawing, I wanted to try doing a simple sketch every day, for as many days as the weather would allow. I did try this a few years back and quite enjoyed the experience, so if you are interested, here is the link to that session

My drawing media is 165gram Sketching paper and a Derwent 6 pencil set consisting of 3B through to 2H pencils. The other essential bit of kit is a pencil sharpener. I remember these when I was a school. The only difference is this one has a selector switch that allows you to select how sharp the point is.

The drawings were made between the 10th and 17th of July 2022, with a missed day on the 16th due to cloud and poor timing. Scope was a Altair Astro 150mm F/9 Ritchey-Chrétien fitted with what was a Telescope House metal coated glass daylight solar filter. I now believe these are being marketed under the Meade brand name now. The mount was my Sky-Tee 2 Alt/Az manually driven mount. I only made use my Meade 26mm and 40mm Series 4000 eyepieces. The 26mm ideally allowed the Suns disc just to fit inside that eyepieces FOV.

The images next to each drawing are that days image taken from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory website The only adjustments I have made are to rotate , flip and size my drawings to match the orientation of the SOHO image.

Overall I was quite pleased as to how well I was gauging the relative positions of the spots on the solar disc. I didn’t use anything more technical than the MkI eyeball. Next time I would like to try the Solar projection box method, which allows much less guesswork on positioning, but which might complicate the whole process.