The Sun goes round and around.

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My attempts to show the reversal and inversion of the binoviewer view compared to reality are not very convincing. Binoviewer view left. Reality on the right. The differences are shown inside and outside the circles.

The same geometry holds true of a single eyepiece in a straight through view. i.e. without a star diagonal or 45° terrestrial elbow.

I use a 45 elbow exclusively for single eyepieces because it provides the extra glass path length I need for focusing within the desired PST geometry. The problem with this arrangement is the constantly changing field orientation with instrument elevation.

Not that there's much change at this time of year with such a low sun. Looking downwards into a 45 elbow in a telescope would normally give you an upright, "terrestrial" view. Left to right are not reversed so you can still read writing on road signs. A star diagonal gives an upright image but reverses left and right. Twisting the elbow and diagonals around the telescope's axis gets much more complicated as to image orientation.

The red arrows [in the images above] represent the Sun's surface rotation as seen from the Earth. In the absence of clear sunspots it is not easy to judge this from intermittent observations. I constantly surprise myself on my complete ignorance of these simple matters. After over half a century of looking up I have only rarely looked at the sun and then only in filtered white light.

So it has never mattered to me which way the sun seems to rotate or which way is upside down or left to right through the telescope. I tried Googling about it. Nobody seems to make it remotely clear regardless of search terms. All they want to do is talk about the Earth's rotation.

Solar rotation matters because there is an emergent limb where new "stuff" constantly pops into view around the curve of the sun's surface. Then there is the opposite edge where everything is carried out of sight. It takes about 14 days for a feature to cross the Sun's disk. Too slow to easily judge movement if you have no obvious spots to watch.
 
My freehand drawing skills of solar phenomena would only embarrass me. Such daubs would still need to be photographed and then reproduced in a suitable format for the blog anyway. With the disk presently starved of spots, at this part of its cycle, any minor detail is interesting. It is also good practice for training my eyes to seek out this low contrast detail.

My view is very dependent on the position of the "ring" as I move it around the sun's disk. Prominences can literally switch "on and off" as the "ring of truth" is moved near the limb. The same is true of surface detail.

The so-called "sweet spot" is a well known phenomenon amongst H-alpha solar enthusiasts. My own "sweet spot" just happens to be ring shaped. If I try to expand it by tuning the etalon I get no surface detail at all! The ring appears as a slightly darker, finely textured area, projected onto the sun's surface. It lifts the fine texture out of an otherwise plain, red sun.

Difficult to describe but not unlike rolling the sun's image with a finely textured paint roller. The better the "seeing" [atmospheric steadiness and clarity] the more detail I see and the more the ring spreads its amazing clarity. This is demanding a great deal with the sun scraping along the heated ridge of my house in mid winter.  Though I am certainly not complaining. I have had some amazing views of our Sun's surface and "smokey" prominences in the crimson red of Hydrogen-alpha light.

15.30 38F out. 44F in. Tried the 20mm EPs with more success. Sun just clearing the house ridge going West. Just in time for the cloud to arrive! Closed up and returned indoors to the warmth.

Click on any image for an enlargement

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