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6/18/2011. After a month of quiet, the Sun has begun to put on a show with several active regions, some limb action, and this striking field of bright and dark plasma.
Active Region 1236
The usual processing: AVISTACK2, then wavelets in Registax 5.1, then Focus Magic in Photoshop. Limb and disk detail processed seperately from the same stack of video frames.
6/21/2011. The Solstice Sun. I started these photos at the moment of the summer solstice. The striking thing was the utter stillness of the image. I focused, and detail finer than any I have ever seen on the Sun snapped into view on the computer screen. I stared: it didn't move. I thought the computer had frozen up, but the air was just that still. I hurried to capture the scene and got a good frame; then I focused slowly and carefully and got a better one:
AR 1236 I wanted a whole Sun image to commemorate the day and began a Keystone Kops saga that stretched out over the next two and a half hours. I framed the Sun, clouds came along. The clouds went away, and I tried to reframe the Sun. The motors declined to spin: battery was weak. I shot the scene anyway, letting the Sun drift through the frame, then I brought the battery inside to charge it. Clouds came and went. I processed the whole Sun image and noted a minor flare in progress in the sunspot group I had just photographed. I set up the camera for another close-up. I took the partially charged battery out as the clouds came and went. They came whenever I was ready to record video; they went while I reframed the active region. Under my secular burka of black fleece, sweat dripped constantly. Some of it landed on the touchpad, some on the keyboard. Soon, the touchpad declined to work -- the cursor would move side to side along a single row. I rebooted, zeroed in on the active region. And clouds covered the Sun just as I prepared t press F9 [record]. I added more charge to the battery while waiting for the clouds to clear out. By the time the clouds moved away, the Sun had moved behind a tree. I moved the telescope. It wouldn't reach the Sun without doing a meridian flip. I flipped it, and re-located the Sun just in time to watch clouds cover it up again. Then along came ten clear minutes and I grabbed another close-up... but by then there was no sign of the flare activity, and that magically steady air from earlier in the afternoon was gone. Sometimes it just be's that way. Here is the whole Sun image, with flare:
The Solstice Sun Note that the flare (just below and left of a prominent spot, at the end of a long dark filament) is not "the solstice flare" that sent a coronal mass ejection toward the earth with predicted geomagnetic effects on June 24. That one took place several hours before this minor spark. X-ray emission from this event never got above the low B-class.
6/22/2011: Amy's birthday sun. A somewhat milky sky promised good seeing but low contrast, and that's exactly what I found. I thought I could probably make up for the contrast in processing. The small 12v gel cell again balked, reporting only 5.7v, so I'm thinking one of its inner something somethings is on the fritz. I toted the heavy duty 12v cell out for the LXD55. I tried an auto-exposure run because it would save a lot of clicks if it worked. It didn't. The result was vastly over-exposed. Herewith, the more or less standard +12db, 6ms, 300 frame version:
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© 2011, David Cortner