How to watch the sun -> sunspots

[MalcolmInN]

How to watch the sun safely and without expensive equipment.
There was a lot of interest in the solar eclipse so I thought you might be interested in watching for sunspots whilst waiting for the next eclipse !

On Stargazing Live you may have seen them describing pin-hole viewers and collanders etc. for projecting an image of the sun. So you may be interested in my BIG version that I used for the eclipse back in '99
A bit late for this eclipse but I was surprised that I could also use it for viewing sunspots. Very surprised at the detail it was able to show.

Using a cheapish make-up mirror donated by my daughter on a stool outside the front door, I shone a beam of sunlight down the corridor to the far end wall, stood a card with hole in it in the beam infront of the mirror and thus projected an image of the sun onto a piece of paper hung from a shlf on that wall.
The size of the hole and projection distance can be varied for best effect : I used a 5mm hole and distances of between 10 and 20m, but at 20m the image can be a bit dim, so needs a darkened corridor (close doors, curtain winows and shut the front door down to just a slit for the beam. )

I did not have a digital camera in those prehistoric days, so I pencilled in the spots and later compared it with an image from the Big Bear Solar Observatory, I think my heath-robinson giant 'pin'-hole camera contraption did quite well :

Big Bear http://www.bbso.njit.edu/did give me permission to use various of their images in some web pages and demos that I gave back then,
the full size Big Bear image is still in their archive at
http://ftp.bbso.njit.edu/pub/archive/1999/10/26/bbso_white_fi_19991026_164158.jpg

The Stargazing Live team said that now was a good time to watch the sun as it is at a maximum of activity in its 11year cycle. Sadly it is nowhere near as active as it was in '99, and even '99 was not a patch on the big very big events of the 1958 maximum

Have fun with what I call MISER ( Malcolm's Instant Solar Evaluation Resource )

[MalcolmInN]

Ah!
I think I should have posted this in the "other hobbies" section under an "Astronomy" heading ?

Addendum : I've just discovered that car wing mirrors appear to be front surface, so that should be better than a ( lost , another story)  make-up mirror,
more on that if ever the sun visits me again.