Observing the sun yourself

Don’t ever look directly at the Sun through a telescope or in any other way, unless you have the proper filters. One can damage their eyes by looking directly at the Sun in a single blink.

There are few ways you can observe the Sun, and hopefully sunspots, for yourself. The easiest and safest is to project the Sun by building your own pinhole camera. Or, if you have your own telescope, you will need to obtain a solar filter. There are even solar telescopes online, which you can access via the web to observe the Sun.

You can easily and safely observe the Sun by projecting it through a tiny hole onto a white sheet of paper. This simple device is called a “pinhole camera”. You’ll need:

1. 2 sheets of stiff white paper
2. A pin
3. A sunny day
4. Perhaps a friend to help

With the pin, punch a hole in the center of one of your pieces of paper. Go outside, hold the paper up and aim the hole at the Sun. Now, find the image of the Sun which comes through the hole. Move your other piece of paper back and forth until the image looks best. What you are seeing is not just a dot of light coming through the hole, but an actual image of the Sun!

Example of pinhole projection to observe Solar Eclipse

Experiment by making the holes larger or smaller. What happens to the image? What do you think would happen if you punched a thousand holes in your paper, and you put little lenses in front of each hole to refract (e.g. bend) the solar images to all fall on top of each other. What do you think you’d see? In fact, optical telescopes can be thought of as a collection of millions of “pinhole” images all focused together in one place!

You can also project an image of the Sun using a pair of binoculars or small telescope.

Safe projection of Sun through a binocular

Safely project the Sun through a telescope