The Sun, June 19, 2026
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June 20, 2026
Here is another picture of the Sun made using a Sky-Watcher Heliostar 76α H-alpha telescope and a 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.
The conditions for imaging were good. I captured the video when the Sun was at its highest in the sky, around 1 pm EDT. I shot 6 videos of about 1000 frames each, with exposure times ranging from 10 ms to 100 ms. I then stacked the best 200 frames from each video and compared the results. The best results came from the 10 ms frames.
Tekkies:
Sky-Watcher Wave 150i mount, Sky-Watcher Heliostar 76α H-alpha telescope, Player One Xena-Mcamera. Acquisition with SharpCap. Grading, registration and stacking with AutoStakkert. All processing in PixInsight. Acquired from my home in Guelph. Acquired under poor transparency and seeing at about 1 pm EDT on June 19, 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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