Seeing the Sun in Hydrogen Alpha

The Sun is anything but still. Its surface and atmosphere are constantly changing, with sunspots, bright active regions, and enormous loops of plasma that can stretch thousands of miles into space.

One of my favorite ways to observe the Sun is through a specialized hydrogen-alpha (H-alpha) solar telescope. Unlike an ordinary telescope, an H-alpha telescope uses a very narrow filter centered on a specific wavelength of red light emitted by hydrogen. This allows us to see details in the Sun’s chromosphere, a layer of its atmosphere that we normally can’t see.

Through H-alpha, we can watch prominences rising along the Sun’s edge, dark filaments stretching across its face, and active regions evolving over time. Sometimes these features change noticeably in just a few hours.

That’s what makes solar observing so fascinating to me. I can point my telescope at the Sun every day and find something different.

The images below are some of the views I’ve captured while exploring our ever-changing star.