The Sun, March 3, 2014

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March 5, 2014 – Astronomy Magazine Picture of the Day March 7, 2014

I was supposed to go to Seattle on March 3, but came down with a wicked cold, so decided not to fly; I have postponed.  As luck would have it, it was a glorious, sunny day (cold though at -20C) so I took the opportunity to take another shot of the sun.  It was very, very active!That night was also clear, giving me an opportunity to get a few more hours on the object I’m shooting right now.  I hope to get a couple more hours tonight and then will process it, so stay tuned!

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; 11x1m of the disk (each exposure 1/125th .  The best 20 frames from each video were stacked, and the 11 disk images were combined in Registax to make a master frame.  This was processed in Registax using wavelets, and then further processed in PixInsight as follows: Background neutralization to balance colour, deconvolution, stretch, wavelets (6 and 4 layers), local histogram equalization, unsharp mask, contrast and saturation.