The Sun, July 3, 2026

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July 5, 2026

The air was steady and transparent when I captured this picture of the Sun on July 3, 2026. I used my Sky-Watcher Heliostar 76α H-alpha telescope and 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.

We do what we have to. I was with the laptop in the shady garage, beside the recycling and garbage bins.

I shot two videos of about 2000 frames each, with a 10 ms exposure time. I then stacked the best 400 frames of each and chose the best one for processing as described below.

Tekkies:
Sky-Watcher Wave 100i mount, Sky-Watcher Heliostar 76α H-alpha telescope, Player One Xena-M camera. Acquisition with SharpCap. Grading, registration and stacking with AutoStakkert. All processing in PixInsight. Acquired from my home in Guelph. Acquired under very good transparency and seeing at about 4:46 pm EDT on July 3, 2026.

Processing

Deconvolution: BlurXterminator was applied to the image with Automatic psf , star sharpening set to 0, and non-stellar amount set to 0.36.

Solar Processing: Bill Blanshan’s Solar Toolkit process was used to enhance and colourize the image.

Sharpening: UnsharpMask was applied to sharpen the image (StdDev 2.7 and Amount 0.63).

Final Steps: Background, disk and prominence brightness and saturation were adjusted in several iterations using CurvesTransformation with masks as required. ICCProfileTransformation (sRGB IEC61966-2.1; Relative Colorimetric with black point compensation) was applied prior to saving as a jpg.