Sunspots Galore

Solar Imaging Is Improving!

Three huge sunspot groups continued their parade across the Sun on Monday, August 1.

Monday morning I began imaging at prime focus with intention to produce a panorama of the entire solar disk. The following image is the result of processing seven, 400-frame videos. Approximately 200 individual frames from each video were saved and combined together to produce seven individual images of slightly different portions of the solar disk. Finally, these seven individual images were knitted together in Photoshop to produce the image below:

Notice the numerous prominences around the rim! (Click to see full detail.)

I'm still learning how to colorize the grayscale images produced by the camera. The telescope produces a pure red image that looks something like this:

Unfortunately, the prominences look rather dim in this colorized view.

After recording the videos for the disk panorama I used a 2X Barlow lens to get magnified images of each individual sunspot group. Here's the upper group:

The upper sunspot group. (Click for full detail)

Here's the middle sunspot group. It recently emitted a solar flare and sent a blast of particles toward Earth. Check out the spectacular arching loop of gas just left of center!

The middle sunspot group. (Click for full detail.)

Finally, here's the bottom sunspot group:

The bottom sunspot group. (Click for full detail.)

You are looking at magnetic fields gone wild!