Sun Spots

The Transit of Venus came and went and much to my extremely disappointment the weather in Vancouver well, disappointed.  The end result was that I missed the Transit.  Nothing but clouds and rain.  Since then the weather has cleared up slightly, which is to say every now and then you can see some patches of blue.  This frustrates me on several because I bought a white light filter for my new 11" telescope that I really haven't been able to use.

Well, today I spotted a break in the clouds and made good use of the brief appearance of the sun.  The first picture shows about a quarter of the solar disk.  In the center of the picture is active region 1504 which contains about half a dozen sun spots.  Below and to the left there are a few more faint sunspots.  Presumably each of these sunspots have some sort of active prominences or flares but we can't see them in white light.  

 

This is a close up of active region 1504 taken through my 11" SCT with a canon T3i using a 2x Barlow.  I would have liked to do a few more high resolution shots but tracking, wind and eventually clouds made than impractical.  Fortunately the sun isn't going anywhere!