Well I was about to write that it’s been at least 3 weeks since it’s been clear enough to go out and observe, but I was wrong. My log shows the last clearish night we had was on the 24th June. Either way, it seems like an age since I looked through an eyepiece. Even during the day, the weather has been awful recently, but this morning the sky had larger bits of blue stuff than cloud, so it was good to open up and see what the Sun was doing.

Currently there are two main spots 1514 and 1520. 1540 was just about to pass through the South Western Limb while 1520 was emerging from the Easterly side at the same latitude.  Observation started 10:05 UT.   Seeing Somewhat stable, but there were wind gusts.  Transparency: Mostly Clear. Scope Altair

Astro 250mm f/8 RC. Observations at 113x, 51x, 78x and 209x

Full disc observation with 40mm. New spot 1520 best resolved in the 26mm. Nice and sharp. Image degrades when anything more than 26mm. The lollipop shape to the East of the largest spot is well defined, but surprisingly is broken up into sections in the webcam image taken. I was sure the stick of the lollipop was solid when viewed visually

Faculae not very obvious anywhere around 1520, but where you do see it, it is only noticeable by dark peppering between what would be the the lighter areas.

Spot 1514 faculae quite prominent, but only with the 40mm.

Managed to get the DMK webcam on the scope to capture the image above. This comprised of a 2000 frame AVI run through Registax 6, with pretty much default settings. Then loaded into PS for some curve work and sharpening.

Having done a few hours of observing and imaging and feeling quite content with what we had done, the Cloud God decided that we had been given enough Blue stuff and the weather reverted to what we’ve had for what seems like weeks.