This first picture was taken 6/9/02 in Highlands Ranch, CO during the Hayman forest fire. I was located 34 miles northeast of the fire, but was in the path of the smoke, which provided a natural filter to take pictures of the sun. There were times that I could hardly tell where the sun was through the smoke. After viewing the pics full size, I realized that there were spots on the sun. I downloaded an image from the SOHO web site taken about the same time - the spots matched. I had captured sun spots using a Canon D60 with a 75-300IS lense. The Hayman fire burned more than 138,000 acres.

Here is the picture that I took, a matching image from the SOHO site, a 2x magnification of the first pic, and some sunset pics 9 days later with a matching SOHO image. Click on each image to see a larger version.