During visits to the Isle of Man in the 1990s, Dr Henry Soper showed Leeds AS members his medium-format 220 film meteor cameras with which he recorded high-quality meteor trails and spectra, earning him the BAA's Merlin Medal in 1996.

He demonstrated his home-made equipment - a Foucault pendulum, a magnetometer, and a spectrohelioscope (in his billiard room). The attached photo of the Sun in H-alpha was obtained in May 1992 with this device. I used Kodak Technical Pan 2415 film, a slow, fine-grained monochrome emulsion that is sensitive to the red part of the spectrum. I held my Pentax ME Super SLR camera over the eyepiece, took afocal shots, bracketing the exposures, and hoped for the best. This was long before digital photography (for me), so apart from the camera's viewfinder I wouldn't see the results until I got back home and developed the film. Luckily, they came out quite well, although the darkening to the right of the photo was caused by the camera not being perfectly centred. I took some other shots of the prominences on the solar limb. They're not as impressive, due to the contrast against the sky.

His spectrohelioscope had a small lever which we could move to tweak the wavelength of the apparatus giving different views of the solar atmosphere. It was amazing to see such detail on the Sun using a device hand-crafted by Henry. More fun than using a modern off-the-shelf solar telescope. He showed us the motorised ceolostat feed outside, which projected the solar beam into the house through a length of pipe. His wife mentioned that he craftily waited until she went away for a day or so before he knocked the hole through the wall!