Here are two mosaics of the Sun stitched together with images collected on Wednesday afternoon. These images were taken with a Nikon D90 through a 12″ Meade SCT fitted with an H-alpha filter. The first mosaic is of the full disc of the Sun. There are some details, but the glare of the photosphere, even through the very narrow passband of an H-alpha filter, limits what can be seen in the chromosphere and corona. In the second image, the transfer curve for image was manipulated to eliminate the photosphere and highlight the chromosphere and corona. Notice on the lower right portion of the limb, there is one small, bright, prominence, and several faint and larger prominences. (since the image is inverted, this would be the north-eastern side of the limb.
Full disc mosaic of the Sun in H-alpha emission.Full-disc image of the chromosphere and lower corona in H-alpha.
Ok, it’s not the greatest picture, but we still are dealing with the wind shaking the telescope. You can see a couple of sunspots from, though. These are spots associated with the new solar cycle, #24. Note their latitude. Sunspots early in a solar cycle will form at high latitudes at first. Later in the cycle, these spots will appear at lower and lower latitudes as the Sun’s magnetic field gets more and more twisted. More Sun pics are coming, but it will take me a while to work through the processing. Sunspots from Solar Cycle 24 Faint prominences hovering above the chromosphere.
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Here are some nice videos of the Sun as taken by my honors student using our 12″ Meade, a Meade electronic eyepiece, and an H-alpha filter. The wind was brutal, so the images are rather shaky.
This first video highlights the granulation in the photosphere, and the glow of the chromosphere evident above the photosphere when looking at the edge of the solar disc.
This clip shows a small prominence arching above a small sunspot group that had already rotated out of view.
First of all, the photos below were not taken by me, but by my honors student this semester. So far, the images have been pretty good, given the level of light pollution here in the middle of town. All of these images were aquired using our 12″ Meade SCT and an SBIG ST-8XME Camera and an SBIG CFW-8 filter wheel. The first is a color image of Jupiter. The red filter we have is a bit too broad and has a higher transmittance than the green and blue filter.
The next image is of the Great Cluster in Hercules, M13. This image is the combination of multiple short exposures co-added to yield a single, more detailed image.
This last image is a mosaic of five images to create a single image of the 1st Quarter Moon. …ok, slightly past 1st Quarter. The image was taken using our blue filter.
