The Sun, Nov. 10, 2016

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November 10, 2016

During the first half of November, 2016, I had my equipment in the observatory down for maintenance, and was awaiting a new telescope. Naturally, there were many clear nights during this time! Since I couldn’t easily capture deep sky objects, I turned my attention to lots of visual observing, including looking at the Sun. On November 10, although the seeing wasn’t very good, I was struck by how quiet the face of the Sun looked compared to just a year or two ago, when it was really active. Save for a couple of sunspots and prominences, not much going on. I captured this just before the Sun went behind the trees. 

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 a 2m video at about 6 frames per sec.  A master frame was made from the best 150 frames.  This was processed in Registax with Wavelets.  PixInsight was used for further processing as follows: Background neutralization to balance colour, restoration filter, TGVDenoise, unsharp mask, stretch to adjust black point, adjust contrast, colour saturation.