StarTools

I was setting up early for a shot at M101 tonight, and decided to grab some video of the Sun. There's been a lot of sunspot activity being imaged of late, and even though i don't have any dedicated solar equipment, thought I'd see what I could capture.

Fairly sure that what we have here is sunspots 1744-1747, with 1745 being the largest to the "top left". Here is SOHO's image from roughly the same time, for comparison.

• Taken at 1555 CDT from Middle TN.
• ED80T CF
• CG5 Mount
• EOS 1100D Unmodded
• Backyard EOS Planetary Mode
• Hotech Field Flattener
• DIY Solar Cell from Baader film

I took 1000 frames at ISO 100, 1/4000" in BYE's planetary mode. Stacked the top 500 with Registax.

In StarTools I used sharpen, then rotate and mirror for correct orientation, and then the color module to balance to something a bit more realistic, moving things toward the yellow/orange range by boosting green and red.

SunTools! That's really cool Gordon.

Could you roughly outline what steps you used to get to this results?
Ever thought of doing a HDR composite?

admin wrote:Could you roughly outline what steps you used to get to this results?

Just Sharpen, Color, and Rotate/Mirror as mentioned above. Sharpen was default all around, Color was bumping saturation to about 125%, max on both high and low end, and then I ran Red and Green up to about 3.0 for some yellow, and then played with green to get the orange-red color.

Ever thought of doing a HDR composite?

I did one way back with M42 as a trial exercise, so I understand the basic concept anyway.

In this case, I don't think there's a benefit to be had..at least not yet. Tell me if my thinking is wrong here...

This image was shot at the lowest possible exposure on the camera, ISO 100 1/4000" exposure time. Can't get any less light into the camera than that. It's still a little overexposed imo. I'm thinking maybe adding an ND filter to the train so I can dampen things even more.

My thinking/hope is that a lower exposure will give some more definition to the sunspots, and perhaps let some of the fainter ones be more visible. If that proves to be the case, then I may very well look to combine some exposure times, and see what I get.

For grins and giggles, I went back and restacked, this time with a 2x drizzle. Then I cropped out the area of the major activity, and then went pretty heavy with the saturation, and used the HDR Optimize preset and the Contrast module to try to really grab as much definition as I could out of the sunspots.

Got a few halos around the sunspots now, but I'm pretty pleased with the results anyway :
Gotta say, Ivo...StarTools has some really nifty capabilities with stuff that's a little "outside" the normal DSO mentality.

gboulton wrote:

Ever thought of doing a HDR composite?

I did one way back with M42 as a trial exercise, so I understand the basic concept anyway.
In this case, I don't think there's a benefit to be had..at least not yet. Tell me if my thinking is wrong here...

Might get some prominences that way? It'll also allow you to color these differently from the reset of the sun if they reside in their own exposure.

EDIT: love the 2x2 drizzle repro by the way!

So this is cool...

If you look in both images, directly left of 1745 at the edge of the solar disc is a darker mottled area of "disturbance". Reddit user plaidhat1 and I discussed it yesterday when I posted this over there.

Welllllllll....today we appear to have our answer. THREE X-class flares coming 'round the bend, as it were.

To see those images, and for the flares to be so obviously paired up with what I captured is just one of the neatest things to ever happen to me with a telescope. I mean..obviously I don't take any credit for "discovering" anything...even if there were something to have "discovered", it certainly wouldn't have been me who did it.

This is just the first time I've ever imaged anything "early on" that later became a "big deal". It's REALLY cool to look at MY IMAGE and say "Woah...there that was before we really knew what was happening."

Man I love this hobby.

Just as an exercise in "What did I get?", I reprocessed this crop of the drizzled stack, focusing exclusively on drawing as much of that disturbance out as I could.

Man... That *is* exciting! You caught those flares rend handed!