It was clear today, and it was easy to capture the sun. I tried both 16-bit and 8-bit captures. To tell the truth, the 8-bit AVI gave a better final image than the 16-bit SER format movie. The final images were the best 90 frames from a 460-frame movies. The SER format is a storage hog; so, I have abandoned 16-bit recordings as impractical for my purposes.
I tinkered with Siril (a user-supported astronomical image processing package) this evening and got little for my effort save for some education. Siril has a steep learning curve, I think. I will tinker more with it – maybe on cloudy days when I can’t do any astrophotography.
The sun continues to be very active with lots of sunspot activity, prominences, and mass ejections which account for the very active corona borealis these last few days. The solar disk today looked like this:
You may notice that this image looks a little different from my prior postings. The sunspots seem to have moved far from where they were in prior images. That’s because I realized that my images were upside down as a result of the right-angle prism that houses the fourth of the filters in the optical train. So, in the image above, North is at the top, South is at the bottom, East is on the left, and West is on the right. I know, it’s confusing.
Sunspot groups get unique designations. In the images below, you see AR3780 – the large sunspot group that previously appeared on the sun’s left limb and has been moving slowly to the right (East to West) but that now appears in the lower half of the image as a result of the correcting the image orientation.
The smaller but darker sunspot near the equator on the sun’s eastern limb has the designation AR3784. The remaining images emphasize some of the larger prominences along the solar limb.
If you enjoy following the sun, aurorae, meteor showers, and other astronomical events, you may want to visit the EarthSky website. The site has excellent writers and gleans its information and images from reputable government and academic sources.
Yes, their images are better than mine, and NASA’s budget dwarfs mine too. 🙂