The Eastern Swathe - 5th March

Four days of sun in a row for me is quite a rare thing, so when I finished work today I was keen to get back home and get the scope out to see what had been happening on our star.  At only 6 degrees altitude when this mosaic was taken I was really surprised at the level of detail the 70mm PST mod was pulling out.  This was taken at about 850mm focal length with the DMK31 camera, I think this setup is really going to shine later in the year when the sun is higher and the seeing is good.  The sun seems to have burst into activity over the last 24hours with this bonanza of active regions that have appeared.    The colour version of this image can be found below.

Sun Through The Haze - 4th March

The weatherman promised 'wall to wall' sunshine today, which was technically correct apart from the ever present layer of high cloud throughout the day.  I got home from work as quickly as possible and setup my kit.  It was soon apparent the haze was thicker than expected - my usual exposure of 1/370s was increased to 1/45s, however the haze was reasonably uniform and so was able to get a half decent shot.  The image above was taken with the 70mm PST mod and 1.6x barlow with a DMK31 camera.  3 days in a row imaging!  Can I make it 4?

Prom - 4th March

prom, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

A pretty little prominence captured through the haze with the SS70 @ f9, DMK31.

Lucky Imaging - AR11683 / AR11685 - 3rd March

In solar photography we do something called 'lucky imaging' - this is where to generate a picture we first take a video file of the subject that can be formed of a couple of thousand individual frames, then clever software searches through the video file to find only the sharpest frames.  Turbulence in the atmosphere forms a 'heat haze' that blurs images, so we only want to select the best that are the least distorted, we then 'stack' a number of the best frames to improve the final image still further to improve the signal to noise ratio of the picture.

Today I was taking lucky imaging to the extreme; normally I shoot 1500 frames and then stack 200, however the only break in the clouds was so brief I only managed to shoot 98 frames - that's just over 3 seconds of video!  I then used Autostakkert2 to stack the best 25 of the 98.  The image above is the result.  

AR11683 & AR11685 show a great region of the sun, there is so much going on - a whole host of sunspots, flaring, and filaments; there was even a nice prom on view too.  The region looks very angry!  The shot was taken with the 70mm PST mod, 1.6x barlow and DMK31 CCD camera.

AR11683 & AR11685 2nd March

ar11683 11685 70mm f15 colour, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

Despite looking a very turbulent region of the sun, the big spot associated with this active region is already showing a light bridge - a line of bright plasma cutting across the umbra and penumbra. Still, there is alot going on here; some mild flaring, swirling plasma and quite a few spots. If the sun could just pep up a bit in terms of its activity things would be better!

Taken with the 70mm PST mod @ f15, achieved by using a 2.5x powermate and DMK31 camera.

AR11682 2nd March

AR11682 70mm f15 colour, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

Departing active region AR11682 looked very menacing as it is about to pass over the solar limb. 70mm SS @ f15 DMK31.

AR11681 & AR11684 - 2nd March

ar11681 ar11684 70mm f15 colour, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

Taken with the 70mm PST mod and 2.5x powermate to give f15 this shot shows this angry area on the sun. Activity could well build here in the coming days with these active regions.