Spotless No More

07/17/2016. After a few days of eternal sunshine first one, then three decent spots appeared. When the new archipelago neared the solar meridian, we lucked into clear skies. 'Twas but the work of a moment to put the solar telescope on the mount and capture 12GB of data. That's two weddings in photography years.

 

Click it for a better look.

FireCapture for capture, AutoStakkert2 for stacking, and Registax 6 for wavelet processing. Photoshop to finish. 90mm Orion achromat and Lunt 60THa internal etalon with barlow mounted inside the snout, as described somewhere up above. That's actually 3 clips (500 frames each, best 80-100 of each used) mosaiced together. But I cropped the finished product so tightly that it's mostly just one, 'cause really, when it's not acting like God's own iron filings, how much solar plasma do you really need to see?

 

 

Except where noted, deep-sky photos are made with an SBIG ST2000XM CCD behind a 10-inch Astro-Tech Ritchey-Chretien carried on an Astro-Physics Mach1GTO. The CCD is equipped with Baader wide- and narrow-band filters. The internal guide chip of the CCD most often keeps the OTA pointed in the right direction (I'll let you know when an OAG or guidescope takes its place). Camera control and guiding are handled by Maxim DL 5.12. The stock focuser on the AT10RC has been augmented with Robofocus 3.0.9 using adapters turned on the lathe downstairs. A Canon 6D and a modded 50D find themselves mounted on an Orion 10" F4 Newtonian or carrying widefield glass on an iOptron Skytracker. Beginning in May 2013, PixInsight has taken over more and more of the heavy lifting -- alignment, stacking, gradient removal, noise-reduction, transfer function modification, color calibration, and deconvolution. Photoshop CS4 et seq and the Focus Magic plugin get their licks in, too.

 

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