I popped over the obs. this afternoon and did some imaging of the sun with the Gordon-cam, a portable DBK colour camera designed to run in planetary video imaging mode. This was attached to our Coronado 40mm Solar Max Hydrogen-alpha telescope. I aimed for 1000 frames per video. For this image, I adjusted the exposure/gain to make red saturated & exposed for flares, and green nearly saturated & exposed for surface detail. Even though green should not be detecting light in H-alpha imaging there will be some transmission of red light through the green filters on the camera's sensor. Very useful - 2 exposures in 1, and a nice coloured picture. Oh and I had to de-interlace the picture and reaverage the even and odd rows, then sharpen, which could be fixed with a monochrome sensor (DMK). I just thought I'd post this as the Sun looked surprisingly detailed, with a Coronal Mass Ejection 10-15 earth diameters long. In this image, celestial north should be up, so solar north should be tilted according to the ecliptic angle of about 20 degrees clockwise. As the solar x-ray activity was low, I wasn't expecting much, and was really surprised to visually see these huge stripes across the sun, and a healthy load of flare activity around the limb.
Thursday, 5 April 2012
CME
I popped over the obs. this afternoon and did some imaging of the sun with the Gordon-cam, a portable DBK colour camera designed to run in planetary video imaging mode. This was attached to our Coronado 40mm Solar Max Hydrogen-alpha telescope. I aimed for 1000 frames per video. For this image, I adjusted the exposure/gain to make red saturated & exposed for flares, and green nearly saturated & exposed for surface detail. Even though green should not be detecting light in H-alpha imaging there will be some transmission of red light through the green filters on the camera's sensor. Very useful - 2 exposures in 1, and a nice coloured picture. Oh and I had to de-interlace the picture and reaverage the even and odd rows, then sharpen, which could be fixed with a monochrome sensor (DMK). I just thought I'd post this as the Sun looked surprisingly detailed, with a Coronal Mass Ejection 10-15 earth diameters long. In this image, celestial north should be up, so solar north should be tilted according to the ecliptic angle of about 20 degrees clockwise. As the solar x-ray activity was low, I wasn't expecting much, and was really surprised to visually see these huge stripes across the sun, and a healthy load of flare activity around the limb.
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