When will I ever sleep?

There are a couple of reasons why buying a solar scope at the moment would be silly. In the very short term, it's raining crazycakes at the moment here. In the medium term, we're at solar minimum, so it's not the most interesting time to be viewing.

Um. Yeh.

Photo nicked from Meade website.

Isn't it pretty? The eyepiece it came with is a bit crap, so we swapped in the 10mm when we had a brief break in the clouds, and also had a go with the 6mm.

I looked at the sun! Without my eyeball getting boiled!

We saw three small sunspots. There were two large prominences on the top left limb (I'm not entirely sure which way around the scope is yet), and on the direct opposite limb there were five (maybe six?) small prominences. I saw two... well, they looked like tears on the surface; I'm not entirely up on my nomenclature yet, either. It was very, very cool.

It has occurred to me that getting a PST at this point in the solar cycle is actually excellent. It's interesting right now, and it's only going to get better from here.

But seriously: when will sleep? Observing all day, observing all night... oh yeh, when it's cloudy. And at dawn and dusk.