Clear days (on weekends) have been few and far between. Clear nights even less. On the 25th of July 2010 Active Region 11089 was nicely centered.

In the full disk image below you can easily make out AR11089 just above centre. There is also a small blue dot in the lower right to show the size of the earth in comparison. The second image is a close up of the amazing AR11089 that almost looks like a bit of Chinese script carved into the surface of the sun.

This was my first attempt at creating a mosaic of the sun. The image below is composed from approximately 20 images across the surface of the sun.  Processing this type of Hydrogen Alpha image is very, very painful. It is extremely hard to get consistent colour, clarity and luminance across the whole image. Mosaics tend to add artifacts at the overlap points which show up dramatically especially in the background. My initial attemps looked like a patch work quilt, but after many attempts I have something usable. Assembling and processing the images to get this final image took me about 6 hours. I don't think I will do this too often :-)

The image was assembled from about 30 images Including the separate exposures needed for the prominances around the outside. Warning this image is BIG. The full size image is approximately 3500x3200 and is about 1.4mb. I have not included the full size tiff version here as it is 65megabytes.

For those that are on slower connection I have included a half size version that is about 450kb. The one on the left is the smaller one the one on the right is 1.4mb. 

Its July 5 - 2010 and I finally had a short opportunity to image the sun for the first time in ages. Here is the feature designated AR 1084.  I only had a short window of opportunity before the clouds rolled in. The sun was low in the horizon. 

This was taken with the usual equipment: DMK 41 Mono camera on a lunt LS60THa

With the DMK41 on the Lunt LS60THa Solar scope you juust miss out on capturing the full disk. I manged to get it working using an AstroPhysics  .67 Reducer but had to mount the camera much closer to the reducer. 

The most dificult part was getting the camera close enough to the reducer so that I could still achieve in-focus. I did it with about 3mm of focus travel left and that gives me the full disk using up nearly the full frame with enough room to show large prominences. I only managed to get it working because I hapenned to have a very narrow profile 2"-1.25 adaptor. Most of the standard ones are a bit deeper and that resulted in the ccd being just that bit more further away and not being able to acheive focus. I fitted a 2 in tube to the blocking filter, slide the reducer inside the tube, then locked it in place with a nrrow profile  2 "-1.25 eyepiece adaptor.

I had some time off work and of course for the first week the weather was overcast and we got some welcome rain. This however does not help with my imaging. Over the last few days the weather has cleared up nicely and I have had time to grab some shots of the sun. The images below show various solar phenomenum that took place during March 11-19 in 2010.  The image on the second line is a very large prominence that I photographed on March 19. This is the biggest prominence I have seen to date. All images were taken with a DMK41 camera on the Lunt LS60THa solar scope.

Its surprising how hard it can be to point a telscope at the sun. Here is a simple sol finder that I made for just s few cents. Once I fitted this I can zoom straight to the sun every time.

All that is needed to constantly find the sun every time is to have something that you can fit to the solar scope that will always align itself to the scope and will then cast a s shadow or a spot in the same place every time. The image on the left shows the back of my home made finder.

To make my sun finder I simply used a small plastic container upside down without a lid. Its a few centimeters square. I put a small 1/16 inch hole in the middle of the front panel and a 1 inch hole in the back. On the back hole I covered it with masking tape. The Sun shines through the small hole in the front and shows as a small spot on the masking tape on the back. That's all that is required really.

However you need it to align the same way every time you fit it to the scope or it would be useless. This was easilly overcome. OK this is a small box without a lid, upside down. So at the front and back all I did was cut away about 1/4" of the plastic so it clears the curvature of the scope tube. That's it. Now when I sit it on the scope, the sides that I did not cut will automatically allign it along the tube. I just use a rubber band to hold it on.

Now the first time you fit it you still have to manually find the sun. But once you have it in the centre of the viewfinder, mark the position of the spot on the masking tape. It will then just be a matter of moving the sun to that spot every time. Also if you make the hole at the back bigger (it does not even have to be round) it makes it easier to find the sun as it gives you a bigger screen to project the sun spot onto.

Here are a couple of more images. of the sun taken on the 25th of January 2010. I have been experimenting with different exposures and techniques.

The full disk image is a single exposure using the QHY8 colour camera. It is deliberately overexposed to reveal the solar prominences around the edges and show an interesting side affect. A Ha image should be red only (like the outer part of the image), but when you overexpose to a massive degree, a small amount of light leaks into the green and blue channels, giving the image nice yellow colour on the core while the less bright regions remain pure red. I kinda like the affect. 

The second image is a close up of the active region 11041. This is a stack of the best of 200 frames taken with a DMK41 mono camera during quite bad seeing. 

Here are some composite images showing both the prominences and the solar surface. To do this you have to take two exposusers: In order to capture a prominance, the suns surface is fully oververeposed so it is a solid white disk wit no surface detail. I then drop the camera back to a 1/1000th second exposure to capture the surface details. In post production both images are merged. The first image is the full disk. The second is a close up of the prominence you can just make out in the 8:00 position.

I am considering upgrading the camera to a more high resolution camera. The GSTAR EX is a good camera and has lots of nice features to allow me to occlude the solar disk and bring out the detail in the prominences, or highlights surface detail, etc. However it is a standard format video camera and I feel that you need a higher definition camera to capture more detail on the surface.

The image below was taken on the 28/23/2009 using the Gstar EX on the LUNT solar scope with a 2x barlow. After some processing you can easilly make out the filament in the key feature on the surface.  The image is a single frame with no stacking.

The images below represent my first full disk solar image. I used the LS60THa and the QHY8 cooled camera. As the Image is in narrowband Ha (Hydrogen Alpha) only red spectrum light comes through. The first image shows this image as you see it through the scope. The second image is the same image after dome digital processing to add fake colour and to bring out the details.