Observing the Photosphere and Solar imaging settings

Only recently I made progress in imaging the details of sunspots. This was achieved through :

    - imaging with a monochrome camera

    - imaging of the sun in the early morning to be ahead of turbulence

    - use of seeing monitor from SharpCap and applying threshhold

    - exposure time below 10ms

    - format imaging SER 16 bit

    - stacking limited to 5% best images

    - editing using IMPPG software

So, what can we see of the photoshere with a 200mm telescope :

    -  limb darkening

    -  sunspots 

    - (micro)pores

    - light bridges

    - granulation

    - faculae

    - umbral dots and dark nucleus

    - penumbral fibrils or filaments

    - penumbral grains

    - intergranular bright points

Using my image from april 23 with sunspot AR2993/94 I can identify many of the above mentioned solar features.

EHT will announce groundbreaking Milky Way Results

Next thursday May 12, the Event Horizon Telescope team is about to announce a groundbreaking Milky Way result. See live coverage via this link. 

European Solar Telescope - EST and QuEST

 

Some good information on the solar science can be found on the EST website. See for more solar science this link.

Personally I like the QuEST video's (see this link) which provide an historic overview on :.

- Galileo Galilei - rotation of the Sun

- George Ellery Hale - magnetic fiels in sunspots

- Angelo Secchi - spicules 

- John and Mary Evershed - gas motions in penumbra, now known as Evershed effect

- Richard Carrington - solar flare 

Pint of Science - May 9-11

 

The Pint of Science festival aims to deliver interesting, fun, relevant talks on the latest scientific research in an accessible format to the public and all in the pub! See for more information this link.

ATT Essen

Today attending the ATT In Essen (Germany), biggest astronomy fair in Europe.
Together with Walter and JC

Moon, Mercury and the Pleiades

A beautiful sunset followed by a amazing nightscape with the Moon, planet Mercury and the Pleiades.

Dynamic Sun with huge prominences

This morning I took some pictures of the sun using my SolarMaxIII (H-Alpha). Within a timeframe of 16 minutes the shape of the prominences changed dramatically.

For the first time I used flats for H-Alpha by using a plastic bag and adjusting histogram by changing the exposure time and gain  within SharpCap Pro. 

The SER 16bit file was stacked using AS3!. The resulted TIFF16 file was adjusted in IMPPG and CS4. Color was added in CS4 : Red 1.33, Green 0.44 and Blue 0.2.