The Sun, March 11, 2014

The Sun Mar 11 2014 by Ron Brecher

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March 12, 2014

I shot this photo on March 11 around 1 pm EDT.  The Sun continues to be very active, and you can see that the sunspot groups and other features have rotated and evolved since my image of March 3.  Enjoy!

Tekkies:
Solar View 50, 50mm f/8 refractor with integrated Ha filter with <0.7 nm bandpass, mounted on an EQ-6 mount, roughly polar aligned and set to track at solar rate. Celestron NexImage 5 camera (2.2 micron pixels; 5 MPix).  Shot from my SkyShed in Guelph.  Supplied software was used to capture videos at about 6 frames per sec; 12x1m of the disk (each exposure 1/227th sec).  The best 36 frames from each video were stacked, and the 12 disk images were combined in Registax to make a master frame.  This was processed in PixInsight as follows: Background neutralization to balance colour, deconvolution, HDR Wavelets (6 and 4 pixel scales), TGVNoise, stretch to adjust black point, local histogram equalization, contrast and saturation.