Strongly Celestial

Looking outward; looking backward in time...

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Sun Gallery

These are my pictures of the sun. There is a mix here of images with my Coronado SolarMax (Hydrogen-alpha light) and a few using a standard solar filter on my Orion Mak-Cass telescope (white light). As with all of my galleries, click on the picture itself to bring up a larger, scaleable copy of the picture in a separate window; be sure to expand that window to see the full size of the image!

Date Taken: 10/12/2013

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Imaging Source DBK 41AU02.AS w/ 2x Barlows
Stacked AVI video with RegiStax 6

Comments
This is a composite of two images shot within a few minutes. The first is of the surface, and the second is of the rather large prominence shown here.

Date Taken: 5/13/2013

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Imaging Source DBK 41AU02.AS w/ 2x Barlows
Stacked AVI video with RegiStax 6

Comments
On a day filled with lots of white fluffy clouds, I managed to grab this image of a rather large solar prominence during a lucky few minutes of pure sunshine. The blue dot is an image of the Earth drawn to scale, indicating the amazing magnitude of this solar event!

Date Taken: 8/8/2012

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Imaging Source DBK 21AU618.AS w/ 2x Barlows
Stacked AVI video with RegiStax 6

Comments
I think of the sun as a happy place...why does (s)he look so unhappy today? The surface certainly had some interesting patterns today!

Date Taken: 8/8/2012

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Imaging Source DBK 21AU618.AS w/ 2x Barlows
Stacked AVI video with RegiStax 6

Comments
There was quite a lot of prominence activity all around the sun today. This particular one made an interesting target to capture.

Date Taken: 1/15/2012

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Canon T2i DSLRw/ 2x Barlows

Comments
This was not a particularly interesting day in terms of sun spots, but I enjoyed the striking mottling of the surface. Note in particular the areas of "trubulence" in the lower half of the sun. I am guessing that the long, "S" curve in the southwest quadrant is a solar prominence that is coming out of the sun's surface at us.

Date Taken: 12/10/2011

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Orion StarShoot IV Solar System imager w/ 2x Barlows
Registax 6 stacking of .avi file

Comments
I find it quite difficult at times to capture good images of the solar prominences. The "seeing" (air turbulence) is not often steady, and of course the contrast with the very bright surface makes them particularly difficult to pick up and distiguish in a picture.

This was a good day, though, as I spotted and managed to capture a significant prominence emerging from the surface. Note that the sun itself has been occluded with a black disk in my imaging software simply to remove the distracting brightness from the nice view of the prominence.

Date Taken: 11/25/2011

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Orion StarShoot IV Solar System imager
Registax 6 stacking of .avi file

Comments
On this day I was interested to see a string of sun spots, almost in a straight line and fairly evenly spread out. Along with the spots, this image does a pretty nice job of showing the "cellular"structure of the surface of the sun, which gives it a mottled appearance, similar to an orange.

Date Taken: 2/2/2012

Equipment
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Canon T2i DSLRw/ 2x Barlows

Comments
I always find full sun pictures to be dramatic images. This day was relatively quiet in terms of sun spot activity, but looking at this glowing ball, you can just feel the power in it. This image also very distinctly shows the 3-D sphere, which is of course the true shape of the sun.

I did not shift the hue in this image toward yellow (which our eyes expect the sun to look like). Rather, this is a much truer picture of what the sun looks like through the Coronado Hydrogen Alpha telescope. Reason: This Ha telescope only allows through the hydrogen alpha wavelength of light (656.28 nm) which appears red to our eyes.