We were blessed with a lovely sunny day on Saturday for our day of Solar learning up at Abriachan.  We were fully prepared for indoor activities as forecasts were looking pretty grey.  But as the weekend swung around skies cleared and we ended up seeing plenty of Sun all day.

A day of fun solar learning

Since conditions were so good we moved everything outside, including the talk I’d prepared which was originally put together on powerpoint.  I demonstrated basic shadow time keeping and direction finding, and how solar eclipses take place using a scale model of the Moon and Earth (with the moon’s orbit inclined at 5 degrees).

Based on our model the Earth and Moon were around 3 meters apart with the former about the size of a large orange.  At this scale the Sun would be 10 meters in diameter and over a mile away!  With this model the relative rarity of total solar eclipses becomes clear (on average one every 18 months).

During the talk we also touched upon:

• Sun gods and how our ancestors perceived the Sun as a perfect orb with no imperfections
• The human fear of eclipses
• The discovery of Sun spots and how they revealed that the Sun is spinning
• How spectroscopy revealed that our Sun is in fact a star (at very close proximity)
• Why the Sun is loosing mass – over 600 million tons of hydrogen per second
• The ultimate fate of our Sun – how it will eventually flare up as a red giant star before cooling and shrinking down to a white dwarf

After the talk Clelland took over for some fun outdoor activities including a scale walk of the solar system, DIY spectroscopes and solar lasers using big magnifiers.  We also did a fun experiment simulating the colour of the sky and sunsets using milk in water bottles.

In terms of solar viewing, I setup the 200mm with a full objective white light filter, and we also had a Sunspotter, kindly on load from Glasgow Science centre.  Both setups produced clear views of the Sun’s photosphere, but unfortunately there were no sunspots to see.  This isn’t entirely surprising given we’re bang in the middle of the 11 year solar cycle minimum, although large spots can appear suddenly at any time.  We hope to one day invest in a good quality hydrogen alpha filter for these events, as these reveal many more interesting features, like edge prominences and coronal loops.

Overall a fun day of learning with great interaction and questions from the adults and little ones alike.