I believe its just the clouds on that set in November that give a different scatter of light. Cool pics though.

It does seem that the November photo does have more cloud cover than the other pictures. Also the Tsunami was on December 26th wasn't it?

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.

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.

Wow, cool pics none the less, though! Thanks for posting these!

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.

Thanks for this information I can defintly do some research on this for future refrences.

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.

I guess if you say so but I really don't remember clouds that day but to each his/her own although it could be a possibility.

Anyhow I kind of figured the Sun would be the black object but my question was the flares do you see them or are they clouds too?

But seriously I am not a scientist nor pretend to be one but I have tooken a good 2 dozen pics and I am clearly conscious in the weather and time's I have taken these.

Also why can't an average Joe as myself try to share some wonderful thing as sunflares why because I don't have a billion dollars?

[edit on 10-3-2005 by 2ndSEED]

You don't remember clouds that day? They are visible in the picture though, unless you are talking about a different picture. As for the "flares", you can't see any solar flares in your picture, as I explained in point 2, these are the shape of the whispy clouds in front of the sun being "lit up" and causing burn out.

Also, those pics were obviously taken through a window, causing even more distortion and sun reflection.

[edit on 10-3-2005 by sensfan]

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!

2nd seed, you really have to understand, that black/purple things in the sun in those photos are not real. They are sort of like 'blowouts' of the digitial sensors. They do not actually exist, they are 'data artifacts'.

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!

Be very carefull with this. You might think you are ok with this type of filter, but you could still damage your eyes if you look through the camera at it. The cheapest filter for solar viewing and photography is the baddar filter (made with baddar paper. It's very cheap to buy, and you can make a filter yourself. Just check out a local astronomy store, they can help you out.