Sun - 15 Nov 2013

AR 1890 area - 9 Nov 2013

AR1890 is being very active and i could not help but to over expose some of it to get the light of the surrounding area in my camera. I was thinking of taking multiple exposure to get everything in the image properly but then got lazy :)

Still i liked the image.. here are my usual four flavours.

'Content Aware' imaging! - 13 Oct 2013

Here is a 6 frames mosaic of active area on the sun, with 5 sunspots and a few very bright features. Now the confession. The last image is the original image (i did not process it) of the mosaic which i was not being careful while acquiring the data as you can see the white/blank areas around the solar surface.  

After the telescope and camera, Photoshop is probably the best tool amateur astronomers have. With the help of 'Content Aware' mind blowing feature, i added the remaining surface in the image and there you have it.. human errors gone for good!

Prominence - 13 October 2013

There is a nice solar prominence out there and here is my version of all four different processing combinations.

Flat Field image test

So earlier i tried a thin cotton cloth on halpha telescope for acquiring flat field images (if you have no idea about flat field here is a quick link, though web has many more sources on that). Here is a recap image:

With this method i was able to get a good flat.. here is a stack of few images: 

One can clearly see the 'dust donuts' appearing in this image.. also notice the image is bit brighter in the lower left portion. Is it a good flat? will it do the job of calibration.. lets test this.

Following is a single raw image.. notice the 'dust donuts' are present in this image.

And here is the calibrated image with the flat field.. you can see all the donuts are gone and the image brightness is also 'balanced'.. this is why it is called 'flat calibration', it really flats all the brightness/darkness errors in the image.

'U' on the Sun

okay i had to capture this frame.. Earlier i posted about 5X barlow with Lunt60 was not a successful combination but during the testing i saw this on the sun.. a highly magnetized area has written 'U' in the solar atmosphere.. i am sure 'mair' is in the making deep inside the sun's core :)

 
 

'Flat' patch - 8 Sep 2013

If i remember correctly, there was a very small patch on that day which did not have any solar activity and this is a piece of that area.

'Snake' Mosaic - 8 Sep 2013

Just after the previous 'snake' processing and posting i found a few more AVIs that i had captured for a mosaic.. so here it is: a mosaic of 5 videos/images of snake's surroundings.

Prominence - 8 Sep 2013

I am very late on processing some good files captured on 8 sep.. here is the first from today's processing. 

Lone 'cloud' - 8 September 2013

Found a lonely cloud up there.. For those who know nothing about this picture and solar halpha imaging.. it's not made of water folks. 

Solar surface - 8 Sep 2013

I was mostly grounded by clouds these days and just had the opportunity to image the sun a couple of hours ago. This is first of those images, i will be posting later.

Prominence - 30 August 2013

Here are three different flavors of the prominence, of which animation i put yesterday. This is of course a combined image of 'low' and 'high' exposure of the same area of the Sun. 

Prominence Animation - 30 August 2013

To really appreciate the movie, do watch it a few times to notice every detail in the prominence and at solar limb. So much is happening here.. i keep on watching the movements and there is always something new i notice. In the beginning, there is a 'puff' at the surface. These puffs are faster than the rest of the movement of giant prominence and this one in particular is roughly half of the size of our entire planet earth.. i love to watch them!

Then there are a few big and small pieces flying from the left small prominence to the base of the right big one. The big one seems to move in 3D, rotating and dropping pieces here and there.

I started recordings at 10:55AM and ended at 12:03PM. You can see the sharpness is much better in the beginning and it keeps on getting blurry towards the end. I have noticed this pattern with my other animations. It seems sun behaves much better earlier in the morning and the seeing keeps on getting worst as the day progress, may be because of the heat piling up in the earth's atmosphere?