Disco Sunspots!

 Back in October I posted about using a disco ball to observe a solar eclipse. It turns out that you can also use a disco ball to safely observe sunspots too. Here's how I did so earlier today.

Really all you need is a disco ball, a place to secure it in the sunlight and a shadowed area to project the image of the Sun. Here I have my disco ball sitting on a tripod for a Unistellar telescope. I aligned the disco ball so that it reflected an image of the Sun into my house and nearly 70 feet down a dark hallway on to a sheet of white paper. Here's the result:

It's not a great image, but you should notice a definite gray smudge-like area on the projected image of the Sun. That's a big sunspot that is visible on the Sun today. I also imaged the Sun with a Unistellar Odyssey Pro telescope and solar filter. I got this image which I rotated to match the orientation of the projected image above.

As you can see, that's the same sunspot group in both images. This is another confirmation that a disco ball is an excellent tool for safely observing the Sun.