The Sun, June 15, 2026

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June 16, 2026

Well, it’s official. I think I enjoy solar imaging. The equipment and software available to amateurs makes it much easier than it used to be to get really high quality photos of the Sun. I am using a Sky-Watcher Heliostar 76α H-alpha telescope and a Player One Xena 585-M camera, all on a Sky-Watcher Wave 100i mount. I controlled the mount with a very old hand controller that I have from another Sky-Watcher mount.

I put the mount on my driveway approximately aligned to north (no measuring or checking), leveled the mount by adjusting the tripod legs, set the altitude axis of the mount to my latitude. Then I turned on the mount and set it to the Solar tracking rate using the hand controller. That turned out to be good enough polar alignment to keep the Sun pretty stationary and comfortably in the field for up to a couple of minutes.

I slewed the telescope towards the Sun, and used the built-in Sun-finder on the scope to get it approximately centred on the sensor.  I watched the computer screen and used the hand controller to perfectly centre the Sun on the sensor, using SharpCap for video capture. Focusing was the hardest part. Seeing was terrible as it was just before sunset, there were some intermittent clouds, and the bright Sun made it hard to see the screen clearly. Once focused, I adjusted the H-alpha band tuner to get as much visible detail as possible.

I acquired a video of about 1000 frames and used Autostakkert software to identify and stack the best 200 frames. The resulting image was processed in PixInsight to create the image you see here.