The Sun, June 30, 2012

The Sun, June 30 2012

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June 30, 2012

I shot the moon last night and the sun today.  Enjoy!

Tekkies:
Celestron NexImage 5 with Gain=4, exposure set to avoid white clipping, 24-bit RGB, full frame, unbinned.
Sun:  SolarView 50 mm f/8
EQ-6 mount, rough polar alignment, no guiding
Shot from my driveway, just north of Guelph, ON.

1500 frames for the sun’s disk, and 500 frames for the sun’s prominences were captured in an AVI video file.  For each shot Registax was used to align the frames, identify and stack the best 20-50 frames, and do initial processing (align colour planes, colour balance, wavelets).  PixInsight was then used on each frame with unsharp mask and ACDNR to remove very fine scale noise in luminance and mid scale noise in colour.  I used Photoshop to align the disk and proinence images and combine them to show both, followed by a final colour tweak in PixInsight.  Image scale for these camera and telescope combinations is about 1 arcsec per pixel.