My predilection in astrophography is Deep Sky work – nebulae, clusters, and galaxies. Still, the situation sometimes calls for portraits of objects closer to home – the Moon, planets, and the Sun.
My brother and I have recently been talking about the upcoming solar eclipses. The first is an annular Solar eclipse that occurs later this year in October. The second is the total Solar eclipse in April of 2024. Since we are planning on getting together for these events, I thought that now might be a good time to practice my solar photography and image processing skills. I haven’t practiced either since the great eclipse of 2017 that we saw in Casper Wyoming.
We are having three days of clear skies this week, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to clear the cobwebs in the observatory dome and take a few pics.
Below is an image of part of the solar disk from today. The sun has had a lot of sunspot activity this month, and the spots afford me a good focusing target. I chose to frame the largest group of sunspots, but some of the smaller groups are visible as well.
There was a lot of atmospheric turbulence today with the temperature in the 103+F range. This image is comprised of the best 50 frames from an AVI file of 5000 frames. The ISO was set to 100, and each frame is a 1/500th second exposure. The camera’s zoom was set to 5x – the maximum that my Canon 6D Mark II offers.
Sunspots – best 1% of frames from a sequence of 5000 frames: ISO 100 1/500th sec frames
The image below is the best 100 frames from among 5000 taken without the camera’s 5x zoom.
I’m going to see whether I can make a few decent images of the moon tonight. The image processing techniques are pretty much the same as I used today for the sun. Maybe the air will be a little less agitated than it was this afternoon.