This picture was taken on July 5, 2026, at about 7:40 a.m. from our balcony in Henderson, New Zealand.
Jeanne and were having our coffee on this mid-winter morning and looking at our world through light condensation on our sliding door. A heavy, early fog had made that world smaller to such a degree that I hadn't given much thought to snapping pictures.
But that sun suddenly looked rather special to me. I snatched up my camera, popped barefoot out onto the balcony, and collected this moment in time.
As I sat at my computer shortly thereafter, the urge to zoom into the sun hit me, and I'm very glad that I did. While this wide-angle shot has a lot going for it, I was thrilled with the discoveries I soon made. Let me show them to you.
My post will be a relatively short one today, but it will demonstrate the importance of looking closer. As my brother-in-law, Fred, likes to say, "Who knew?"
We go now, to the closeup in which I noticed something. Look at the upper left hand side, at about 10 and 11 o'clock. I see little spots there.
When I first saw them, I wiped at my monitor screen, thinking that I had smudges. When that failed to remove them, I looked at my Nikon's lens, thinking that I'd find the offending dot of dirt there. But, nothing.
I then zoomed into the three other pictures I had taken in rapid succession and discovered that, although the sun was in a slightly different position on each of them, the spots were in the same location on the sun. This was no smudge or dot of dirt. This was the real Mccoy.
Archimedes apparently once shouted, "Eureka." I uttered no similar interjection, but instead announced to Jeanne, "I've got sun spots.
"Some spots, she asked? Where are they? Do they itch?"
I repeated my statement more clearly and she was soon looking over my shoulder at my screen, not my skin.
This next picture, is the same as the one above, but zoomed in a bit more and with a black/white filter that brings out the spots a little better.
This picture is even more of the same. Extreme zoomies, but look at not only the spots, but the edge of the sun. Jeanne thought that I might be getting some Earthly atmospheric distortion, but I think I am also seeing some detail of the surface of the Sun.
Utterly astounding in my opinion, that I can step out my back door, snap off a quick photo of the morning sun, and with a little computer work, be privy to some of the secrets of the universe. And I'm not quite done.
Let's go back and look at the Sun photo I showed you earlier. Notice that the Sun appears to be elongated from side to side. It looks wider than it is tall.
I looked up the stats on the Sun and discovered that it is classed as an oblate spheroid. In other words, not a perfect sphere. But, in fact, it is only 12 kilometers wider than it is tall, which is nothing considering that it is 1.392 million kilometers in diameter.
The sun in this picture measures 135 mm wide by 123 mm high. A huge difference and one that is explained by the fact that this sun was photographed only about 15 degrees above the horizon of the Earth. The distortion in its shape that we see now will disappear as the Sun climbs higher and it'll be its usual oblate spheroid self when it's higher overhead.
I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing these wonders with you today. I hope that you've found it intriguing as well. Keep watching. I'm going to dig up some old pictures of a similar nature and re-acquaint you with more jaw-droppers. (My jaw drops anyway, but then again, I'm pretty old. Maybe it's my default setting.) -djf
