The Sun, October 12, 2014

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October 12, 2014

I took this image of the sun around noon on October 12, 2014.  It was a beautiful day in the middle of the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so I was in a bit of a turkey haze while making this image!  The grey patches on the disk are the same as the “flames” (prominences) shooting out the side, but the ones on the disk are being looked down on from above.  There is a nice sunspot above centre, and another near the two o’clock position on the disk.   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 3m videos at about 6 frames per sec.  The best 200 frames were stacked in Registax to make a master frame, which then was processed in Registax with Wavelets.  PixInsight was used for further processing as follows: Background neutralization to balance colour, restoration filter, HDR Wavelets (5 pixel scale), TGVNoise, unsharp mask, stretch to adjust black point, local histogram equalization, contrast and saturation.