sun – Page 2 – MatP's view of the world

2020-11-082020-11-21

Sunspot Region 12781 on 2020-11-08

Finally it seems, that the Sun is waking up after a long period of nearly spotless months!
This is a compiled image out of 2000 raw frames. Image is wavelet sharpened in Registax. Further sharpening, level adjustment and colorizing done in Photoshop.

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2020-04-122020-07-12

3 hour Solar prominence timelapse 2020-04-12

This prominence occured right after the sunspot region 12579 vanished and rotated out of view. The video shows the development from 09:02:25-12:15:05 UTC+2.
Video recorded with 715mm f/7 refractor with 4x telecentric system and SolarSpectrum 0.5A filter on ZWO120MM-S camera. Sequence consists of 490 images. Each image is a stack of 500 frames each. (For the complete sequence, 245.000 images have been processed)

2019-09-052020-11-29

Solar prominence timelapse

I had the chance to borrow a Hydrogen alpha filter for solar observation. As the weather was just perfect, I set up my 80/600 refractor with the filter and a camera attached. Every 15 seconds I captured 400 frames for later processing. After 4 hours, my hard disk was loaded with 850GB of data…

Now, more than 2 days of stacking, aligning, optimizing, … are over. The resulting image sequence is simply fascinating and beautiful:

2016-05-092019-01-22

Mercury transit

Today Mercury set its path in front of the sun. The tiny black spot was a nice view to observe. As I was in the office that day, I used a tripod, 1000mm lens and a wired remote trigger to capture a few impressions of the event:

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2016-05-052019-01-22

Sun in H-alpha light with deep sky filter

I questioned myself whether it would be possible to enhance images of the sun using deep sky H-alpha filters. Most likely a filter with 7nm bandwidth would not show prominences. Prominences are so dim, that the rather wide bandwith of the deep sky filter passes too much of bright light to see them. Keep in mind, that typical solar H-alpha filters are in the range of 0.3-1.5 Angstrom, which is 100 times more narrow than the deep sky filter (7nm = 70 Angstrom).
But who knows – perhaps the granulation becomes visible or at least the surface texture may improve…

ATTENTION: Never ever look direct at the sun! You risk your eye-sight, especially through optical instruments without proper equippment! I use specialized filters, suitable for solar work

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I think, the result speaks for itself! It is an significant improvement, as the surface texture is no longer flat!