20th March Solar Imaging
Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2024 6:25 pm
Hi Everybody,
I have been wanting to do some SolarEAA for sometime and today I manged to get outside and give it a go. There was a lot of high and medium cloud with some small gusts of wind, but it was nice and warm in the sunshine. I placed my Celestron NexStar 4se onto the decking table next to the laptop and added the home-made Solar filter and Altair Astro 294c colour camera. Aligning was incredibly easy, with the little scope and hand-controller.
I was using SharpCap to image the Sun. After a bit of focussing I took a single frame snapshot of the Sun. As you see there were a few dust motes on the image. I used an air blower and removed quite a few before continuing.
Switching to SharpCap's Live Solar/Lunar/Planetary tool, I was amazed to find that it just started stacking. From then on I started playing with all the great features of the tool. As I was using a colour camera I adjusted the colour, did some wavelet sharpening. Even started throwing away sub-optimum frames. The decadence Finally, I got the following full disk image. I was just amazed how good the live stacking tool was. I did get rid of the remaining dust motes in Windows Photo using the Retouch tool.
It was great to zoom into different sunspots and explore. Here is Sunspot 3615 (left) and 3614 (right).
Below, is a screenshot of SharpCap in live stacking mode, very impressive tool.
I still have loads to learn but it was great fun to do some solar observing.
Have fun.
Pete
I have been wanting to do some Solar
I was using SharpCap to image the Sun. After a bit of focussing I took a single frame snapshot of the Sun. As you see there were a few dust motes on the image. I used an air blower and removed quite a few before continuing.
Switching to SharpCap's Live Solar/Lunar/Planetary tool, I was amazed to find that it just started stacking. From then on I started playing with all the great features of the tool. As I was using a colour camera I adjusted the colour, did some wavelet sharpening. Even started throwing away sub-optimum frames. The decadence Finally, I got the following full disk image. I was just amazed how good the live stacking tool was. I did get rid of the remaining dust motes in Windows Photo using the Retouch tool.
It was great to zoom into different sunspots and explore. Here is Sunspot 3615 (left) and 3614 (right).
Below, is a screenshot of SharpCap in live stacking mode, very impressive tool.
I still have loads to learn but it was great fun to do some solar observing.
Have fun.
Pete