July 6,2013 Solar Images

Solar Disk July 6,2013

This was my 3rd week of solar imaging and I never knew it could be so much fun. Our sun is constantly changing and there's always something new to image. I've only had about a half a dozen opportunities to image between work & weather. 

6 frame mosaic made up of images created from video files taken with a QHY5L-II & Coronado PST. I took 4 videos for the surface and 2 for the prominences. I took about 500 frames per video and used the best 300, aligned and stacked using Registax 6 software. I then "stitched" the images together with Photoshop CS6.

Not much prominence activity, the largest can be seen at the bottom. I used a 2x's Barlow lens with the same setup mentioned above to capture this close-up image of the large prominence. I blanked out the disk to emphasize the prominence and then rotated the image 180 degrees.

Recently a large sunspot named AR1785 released a solar flare. I next targeted this spot for this image, using the same camera, telescope and barlow lens. AR1785 can be seen as the dark streak at the top center of the image. This was a single video converted into 500 frames and stacked with Registax 6

By inverting the image's color more detail can be seen:

The next image I took was a close-up of AR1785 taken with the same setup. This time I adjusted the camera to image at 800x600 (instead of the usual 1280x960 used in the images above)  which gave a tighter field of view. I used 3 images to create this one. Each image was with the Coronado telescope "tuned" to a different setting as seen here:

 
 




Each of the 3 images were about 300 frames stacked in Registax, then combined in Photoshop CS6. I then inverted the colors on this image as well:

 

 

The last image I took was of a flare seen at the top of my solar disk image just barely creeping over the top

 

This also has been inverted. The sunspot towards the bottom is AR1784. This is a 2 panel mosaic taken with the same gear as all the images above.

 

I wanted to add, I haven't quite got the proper rotation of the sun in my images, I believe they are all rotated 90 degrees clockwise as the sun truly turns. I'll get this down soon......

 

Thanks for visiting and sorry for typo's!