This post title won’t mean anything special to you unless you, like me, were a science nerdlet in secondary school. Our Mister Sun was a 1956 educational science film from Bell Laboratories that explained much of what was known about our star at that time. I think that I first saw in 1962. I was in Middle School, and our science club met weekly and showed a science film of interest most meetings. I was fascinated by spectroheliography as well as by images made with coronagraphs and other solar instruments.
A couple of years later, I saw the film again in my high-school science club. This time, I decided that I would memorize the nuclear reactions that led from hydrogen atoms to the thermonuclear synthesis of carbon and then to heavier elements. Did I mention science nerdlets? I fawned over solar images made with instruments which were far beyond my ability to afford, make, or even use. I never lost that interest in the Sun or in more distant stars, for that matter.
Last October, while photographing the Solar Annular Eclipse with brother Ed and lifelong friend and brother from another mother, Fred (the Gar) Garcia, I decided that I wanted to acquire a solar telescope. This past June I did just that so that I could try my hand at solar astrophotography.
The telescope arrived a few days after my birthday. After some days of looking at the unopened box, I decided to unpack it. I had been overcast for days; so, I wasn’t in a rush to put everything together. Over the next week, I assembled the solar rig: a tripod and mount that I use as my portable astrophotography platform and now the solar telescope and a dedicated CMOS, one-shot color (OSC), solar system camera. I downloaded the imaging software for the new camera from the manufacturer’s website.
Today was First Light for the solar scope. We astronuts call the first time we use a scope its First Light. I made this image of the complete solar disk. It is the composite of the best 1500 frames of a 3000-frame AVI movie.
In this image, you can see my annotations for the solar prominences around the limb of the solar disk. These are typically arch-shaped masses of plasma held together by solar magnetic field lines. Filaments are prominences seen from above against the solar disk itself. Plages are high energy disturbances that are associated with intense solar magnetic fields and are hotter and denser than the surrounding chromosphere.
The sun is very active right now and will continue to be so for the next year. The intense aurorae borealis earlier this year were due to coronal mass ejections (CME) that sent high energy particles outward from the sun and into our path.
Below is a magnified section of the disk edge where the annotation Prominences appears in the picture above.
My solar rig appears below. It’s a Coronado SolarMax III double stack (two Etalons) mounted on an iOptron CEM-60 mount and a ZWO ASI183MC camera. I have a smaller mount that is lighter, and I may try using that instead of the CEM-60. I’m getting too old to tote equipment this heavy every day.
Observing or photographing the sun without proper equipment can result in loss of vision or loss of camera. This 70mm solar refractor is equipped with four types of solar filters. The first filter is positioned at the upper gold ring; it rejects the vast majority of the sun’s light. The next two filters are etalons – each etalon is a sandwich of two dielectrically coated pieces of glass with an adjustable gap between them that is used to tune each filter around the Hydrogen-alpha wavelength emitted by excited hydrogen atoms. The final filtering element is located at the right angle of the golden erecting prism at the viewing end of the optical train.
I hope to post more solar images in the coming weeks and months when the moon makes nocturnal astrophotography difficult if not impossible.