My night-time equipment has been stuck in limbo as I move it from Australia to Arizona; but the sun finally shone at noon in Seattle last week, and I grabbed a few photons.
For your extra viewing pleasure, I have created a little white disc, on the lower right of the image, that is about the size of the earth relative to the sun. Those solar prominences are big!
Now that's a great shot. I have no idea how you managed it, but it's a beautiful photograph. The inclusion of the white dot shows how relatively insignificant Earth is in relation to the Sun (and the rest of the universe).
Not sure where you're headed in Arizona, but we felt the heat of the Sun today when it hit 107-degrees in Phoenix...but as they say, it's a dry heat. Enjoy Seattle while you can.
Absolutely fascinating photograph. I feel very small right now.
I second the request - any insight on how you accomplished this would be greatly appreciated. Beautiful.
Yes indeed this is a nice shot. I also have no idea how to capture such image. A total solar eclipse is coming so maybe you would shade some light?
Is this a big crop or you have some serious telephoto lens (perhaps mirror like).
Any detailed info about the technique would be appreciated, I'm sure to us all.
Thanks.
In my quiver of telescopes, I have a Coronado SolarMax II 90, double-stacked. This is an f/8.8 telescope, with a 90mm objective lens, equipped with two layers of filters which only allow a tiny sliver of light through, in the "hydrogen alpha" part of the red part of the visible-light spectrum. Double-stacking results in a high-contrast image, with a band-pass of <.5 Angstrom. With such a narrow band, anything that's not really, really bright is black. Photographers can think of this as an 800mm f/8.8 lens, with a very, very narrow filter.
My camera is a very high quality video camera (Point Grey Research Grasshopper3 6mp CCD monochrome video camera (GS3-U3-60QS6M-C). I shoot a video for about 40 seconds, at about 25fps.
The telescope/camera rig sits on a mount that tracks the sun quite precisely, so that it moves very little on the sensor in the course of taking a number of 40-second videos.
We shoot video for this sort of astrophotography, because the air is so turbulent that we only get a relatively few sharp images; by taking a thousand images, I have some confidence that I'll get a couple hundred that are usable.
I import the video file into a piece of freeware called "Autostakkert!2," which analyzes the frames, picks the best 200, aligns and stacks them into one image, which I save in .tiff format.
I import the .tiff into a piece of freeware called "RegiStax6," which has a very sophisticated wave-analysis routine, which performs miracles in sharpening the image.
I then do a bit more work on the image in Photoshop CC 2017 (including colorizing the monochrome image).
In my quiver of telescopes, I have a Coronado SolarMax II 90, double-stacked. This is an f/8.8 telescope, with a 90mm objective lens, equipped with two layers of filters which only allow a tiny sliver of light through, in the "hydrogen alpha" part of the red part of the visible-light spectrum. Double-stacking results in a high-contrast image, with a band-pass of <.5 Angstrom. With such a narrow band, anything that's not really, really bright is black. Photographers can think of this as an 800mm f/8.8 lens, with a very, very narrow filter.
My camera is a very high quality video camera (Point Grey Research Grasshopper3 6mp CCD monochrome video camera (GS3-U3-60QS6M-C). I shoot a video for about 40 seconds, at about 25fps.
The telescope/camera rig sits on a mount that tracks the sun quite precisely, so that it moves very little on the sensor in the course of taking a number of 40-second videos.
We shoot video for this sort of astrophotography, because the air is so turbulent that we only get a relatively few sharp images; by taking a thousand images, I have some confidence that I'll get a couple hundred that are usable.
I import the video file into a piece of freeware called "Autostakkert!2," which analyzes the frames, picks the best 200, aligns and stacks them into one image, which I save in .tiff format.
I import the .tiff into a piece of freeware called "RegiStax6," which has a very sophisticated wave-analysis routine, which performs miracles in sharpening the image.
I then do a bit more work on the image in Photoshop CC 2017 (including colorizing the monochrome image).
In my quiver of telescopes, I have a Coronado SolarMax II 90, double-stacked. This is an f/8.8 telescope, with a 90mm objective lens, equipped with two layers of filters which only allow a tiny sliver of light through, in the "hydrogen alpha" part of the red part of the visible-light spectrum. Double-stacking results in a high-contrast image, with a band-pass of <.5 Angstrom. With such a narrow band, anything that's not really, really bright is black. Photographers can think of this as an 800mm f/8.8 lens, with a very, very narrow filter.
My camera is a very high quality video camera (Point Grey Research Grasshopper3 6mp CCD monochrome video camera (GS3-U3-60QS6M-C). I shoot a video for about 40 seconds, at about 25fps.
The telescope/camera rig sits on a mount that tracks the sun quite precisely, so that it moves very little on the sensor in the course of taking a number of 40-second videos.
We shoot video for this sort of astrophotography, because the air is so turbulent that we only get a relatively few sharp images; by taking a thousand images, I have some confidence that I'll get a couple hundred that are usable.
I import the video file into a piece of freeware called "Autostakkert!2," which analyzes the frames, picks the best 200, aligns and stacks them into one image, which I save in .tiff format.
I import the .tiff into a piece of freeware called "RegiStax6," which has a very sophisticated wave-analysis routine, which performs miracles in sharpening the image.
I then do a bit more work on the image in Photoshop CC 2017 (including colorizing the monochrome image).
Heck, Tom, compared to my "normal" astro-image, a solar image is a piece of cake! A solar image takes a few minutes for gathering the data, and at most two or three hours for processing. This one here (the central part of the area of the sky with the constellation Orion in it) took four years for data gathering, has about 130 hours of light-frame data included in it, and took at least 20-30 hours for processing:
StarNut wrote:
Heck, Tom, compared to my "normal" astro-image, a solar image is a piece of cake! A solar image takes a few minutes for gathering the data, and at most two or three hours for processing. This one here (the central part of the area of the sky with the constellation Orion in it) took four years for data gathering, has about 130 hours of light-frame data included in it, and took at least 20-30 hours for processing:
