By Doug Bickley
Perton Astronomy Group which is affiliated to WolvAS meet on the third Thursday of every month. The June meeting saw ten people, mostly Wolvas members meeting at 7pm.
The sun was out, great, because we had a whole range of equipment looking at the Sun on a lovely balmy evening. I had taken the Society PST but no webcam, but I managed a couple of dodgy afocal shots off my phone. The PST is a bit tricky to get right, and the etalon filter adjustment is sensitive, but we did see some granulation (but no flares).
Ben brought his Skywatcher telescope, and we also had the Library Skywatcher refractor both with solar filters and they gave excellent views of the sun with a variety of eyepieces. We are at solar minimum in the cycle and unfortunately no sunspots were visible tonight.
Linda Manas brought her Sunspotter wooden viewer which projects an image onto a sheet of paper, which worked really well.
I also took my DSLR with a homemade baader filter and got a few pictures in white light.
All in all a great night, and as the sun disappeared we finished the evening with a game of spot the Mars/Mercury conjunction but it was too light with an inconvenient cloud just in the wrong place.