The Telescope

The telescope being used is the Coronado PST (Personal Solar Telescope) designed to bring hydrogen alpha viewing at an affordable price.
It has the following specifications:

• Aperture 40mm
• Focal Length 400m
• Thermal stability 0.005 Å/C
• F/Ration F/10
• Bandwidth < 1.0 Å
• Safety blocking >10^-5 from EUV/IR

WHAT WE CAN EXPECT TO SEE
The telescopes filter allows us to view the Sun's chromosphere. There are several features we might see:

• Prominences
• Filaments
• Sunspots
• Active regions
• Flares
• Plague

THE CAMERA
The camera used was a NexImage Solar System Imager web cam which has a CCD sensor to provide excellent light sensitivity and colour fidelity. Its barrel size was 1.25 inches, the same as the eyepiece on the telescope. It also has a live feed for making focusing easy and also took video clips.

CCDS AND USAGE IN ASTRONOMY
A charge coupled device is a device for the movement of electric charge, usually from within a device to an area where the charge can be manipulated. Often the device is integrated with an image sensor, such as a photoelectric device to produce the charge that is being read. The image is projected through a lens onto the capacitor array causing each capacitor to accumulate electric charge proportional to the light intensity at that point. Once the array has been exposed to the image, a control circuit causes each capacitor to transfer its contents into its neighbors (shift register) and the last capacitor in the array dumps its charge into a charge amplifier which converts the entire contents into a series of voltages and digital signals.

DIAGRAM OF THE TELESCOPE
Here is a diagram of the telescope. The lens could be replaced with the camera in the same position.