SUN, Candle and stains

But the telescope showed that the apparent purity of the Sun just an optical illusion. Scheiner in Ingolyptadte, almost simultaneously with Galileo and Fabrizio in Virtemberge and Garriotom (Harriot) in England, discovered the existence of sunspots, but observations of these scholars for a long time not been made public: the researchers were careful to distribute a fact quite contrary to conventional wisdom. Soon, however, doubts have disappeared ... If we consider the sun with a good pipe, which are devices to protect your eyes from the unbearable brightness, it immediately becomes clear that his appearance does not match the first impression: the Sun's surface is covered with some peculiar granules resembling cluster of cumulus clouds, she did not calm and is in the wave-like motion, here and there, visible light shining places, the so-called lights, or torches, and near some dark spots. These spots seem to us extremely small, but if you take into account the terrible remoteness of the sun and we understand how immense must be the size of each of us seen a dark spot. The diameter of the sun is 187.000 German miles, it surpasses the diameter of the Earth more than a hundred times, we see it from the perspective of a 32 '(slightly more than 1 / 2 degrees). Items found on the surface of the Sun and is visible in the best devices for nearly a measurable angle of 1 "up to a hundred miles, a body the size of our Earth 5udet seen at an angle of 17". The smallest spots are represented as barely visible black kidney and sometimes they dot the entire surface of the Sun, they are called pores. These same sunspots is much larger and can reach enormous sizes. For example, the astronomer Tobias Meyer, 15 March 1758 saw a spot whose diameter was twentieth of the diameter of the sun, ie, reached 9,000 geographical miles, and surpassed the Earth's diameter is 5 times. More significant was the spot he had seen in Dessau, September 4, 1850 one of the tireless observers Schwabe, this spot was visible at an angle of 5 ', reached the 30,000 geographical miles in diameter and occupies space in 716 million square miles. This unusually large spot, of course, an exceptional phenomenon, but the spot size of our Earth PRETTY ordinary.