Splendid Sun!

October 16, 2011

Solar imaging improves! Cloudless sky and pleasantly cool temperature made observing comfortable on October 16th. Absolute perfection is hard to achieve, however. It was a bit breezy, sometimes enough to shake the telescope. Nevertheless, I was able to get my best whole disk solar image so far. The following image is a mosaic of seven individual images, each made at the prime focus of my Lunt 100mm h-alpha telescope with a DMK41 camera. The Sun's disk contained a good number of sunspots, dark filaments, and even a few bright white eruptions! Too bad there weren't a few more dramatic prominences. Still, this is the kind of image I hoped to achieve when I bought my solar scope.

(Click for full detail.)

After capturing images at prime focus I used a 2X Barlow lens to magnify some of the sunspots. Here is an image of sunspot 1312, the one at the bottom of the whole disk image near the prominence.

Sunspot 1312 and prominence (Click for full detail.)

Finally, here is an image of the two sunspots slightly below and to the left of the disk center.

Sunspot 1314 bottom left, sunspot 1319 top center (Click for full detail.)

Sunspot 1319 at top center had a beautiful complicated structure seething with bright white energetic eruptions. I recorded 34 minutes of activity in sunspot 1319 and hope to make a good movie for my next post a few days from now.

I also recorded 60 minutes of activity at prime focus showing activity in more than one sunspot. That movie will take much longer to construct and will not appear for a while.

In this productive observing session I recorded 112 videos, each about 27 seconds long. (This amounts to 51 GB of data! Thank goodness for big hard drives!) Each video contains 400 still frames. The 400 somewhat blurry still frames in each video get combined by magical Registax6 software to produce one single detailed still image. Then I enhance and colorize these 112 detailed still images to make movies, mosaics, or individual images. I'm really enjoying this!