[Apparent]CCD failure

[TRNunes]

Hi, everyone!

I just took my first solar pic, as I thought I should start getting familiar with solar observing prior to the transit of Venus coming up in June. As you can see though, the pic didn't exactly turn out perfectly. According to some quick 'research' I did on the Web, it appears that the dark circle in the center of the sun's disk is being caused by CCD failure in my digital camera, which apparently occurs when the sun's brightness in the center of the image overwhelms the CCD imager, leaving zero bits to render in that portion of the pic, therefore resulting in blackness. The picture's otherwise accurate as, without the camera, I visually verified through the EP alone the existence/placement of the three sunspots in the lower left.

Anyway, if anyone has an hints/tips as to what digital camera setting I might be able to tweak to address the [apparent]CCD failure, please let me know. Thanks!

NOTE: THIS IMAGE WAS CAPTURED VIA A TELESCOPE EQUIPPED WITH A FULL APERTURE SOLAR FILTER, AS UNFILTERED VIEWING OF THE SUN IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS (And yes, I know that we all know that, but the imaginary lawyers arguing inside my head insisted I add that caveat). ;-)

[Atlas]

wow freaky pic...I like.

The collapse has started!

[Ibbo!]

Which filter were you using

at first glance it looks to be extremely out of focus and the shutter speed too slow

Try very fast shutter speed and low ISO and go from there

[TRNunes]

Which filter were you using

at first glance it looks to be extremely out of focus and the shutter speed too slow

Try very fast shutter speed and low ISO and go from there

Hi, Ibbo, thanks for the suggestion! It was in focus (ref: the sun spots) and I tried every shutter speed variation. I did not change the ISO though, which may still be set to 400 due to this being my first foray into solar photography, so that's definitely a possibility. As for filters, I was using a Thousand Oaks full aperture film-based solar filter. I've also been toying around with added a filter to the EP... Possibly a lunar filter?

Anyway, thanks again for the response/suggestions!