Solstice Sun, June 21, 2026
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June 21, 2026
It is the summer solstice. The longest day of the year. It was a beautiful day to capture another picture of the Sun with 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.
I shot two videos of about 2000 frames each, with a 10 ms exposure time. I then stacked the best 400 frames and processed 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 10 am EDT on June 21, 2026.
Deconvolution: BlurXterminator was applied to the image with Automatic psf , star sharpening set to 0, psf=5.6 and non-stellar set to 0.2.
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 2.9 and Amount 0.75).
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.
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