AIR shot sun

The AIR project team of Westfalen-Kolleg Dortmund used the last day of the EU-meeting in Katerini/Greece to shoot the sun.

At Friday, the 30th of April, the sun was burning hot at the foot of the Mount Olympus. So the team of the German school used the opportunity to take some pictures of the sun with their new H-alpha solar telescope. H-alpha is the first atomic transition in the hydrogen Balmer series; wavelength 656,3 nm. This absorption line of neutral hydrogen falls in the red part of the visible spectrum and is convenient for solar observations. The H-alpha line is universally used for patrol observations of solar flares, filaments, prominences and the fine structure of active regions.

Teachers and students of the 1° ΕΠΑΛ ΚΑΤΕΡΙΝΗΣ/GREECE were very interested to have a look through the telescope at the sun, seeing the fine structure of the sun surface with little protuberances at the border.

But the last years the sun activity was very low. Normally it might be much higher with more sunspots and bigger protuberances than today. So the German team asks themselves: What's up with the sun?
With the financial support of the Rügers Stiftung the AIR-team wants to explore the sun and find out more about our next star in universe. AIR means "astronomy and internet in the Ruhr region" and describes the tools and the origin of the group.

With help of their Greek friend the German team tried although to measure the diameter of the earth with the shadow of a stick. But this old, historic experiment of the Greek scientist Eratosthenes failed sadly, because to fulfill the terms and conditions of the experiment the AIR-team needed a reference measurement of a German partner school. But the 30th of May was cloudy in Germany and without sun.
So by the way the young scientist only found out the latitude and longitude of Katerini with this experiment and compared the result with modern GPS-dates.