Sun and Stars

This is sort of “how did the processing go” type entry. No real revelations, just making notes to myself, I guess. I'm pretty sure no one but me reads this anyway.

Three sun entries to start.

This was the sun taken September 7^th with interesting and very large sunspots. For the sun to be nearing a solar minimum, this is unusual activity. On the same day this was taken, IF I remember correctly, there were 5 coronal mass ejections recorded by NASA, one of which was headed toward earth and should have produced a nice aurora.

The sunspot kinda looks like an eye, doesn't it?

This image, taken on September 15^th shows a sunspot, and what I think is the beginning of a filament. A filament is, as far as I can tell, a flare or prominence that is seen “face on”, ie, coming towards us. Compare this filament to the prominence on the next image, taken the same day.

The most notable thing about this prominence, other than its giant size, is the detail. This is one of the more detailed images of the sun I have every gotten. I did things a little differently this time. I mounted the solar scope on the LX200GPS scope in the observatory. This allowed me to more accurately track the sun. Usually, I just put the solar scope on a tripod type mount with no tracking. The second thing I did was to make a slight change in the processing. The image file, which is a movie or .avi file, was 1^st processed in PIPP (a program, app to you younger readers, if any, that does planetary image pre processing; hence the name PIPP.) PIPP takes the .avi file and tried to arrange the frames (about 2000 in this case) so that any chosen interesting feature appears to remain steady, frame to frame. The chosen output of this is also an .avi file. This .avi file is then entered into another program call Registax, which takes the frames, aligns them, and then tries to stack them one on top of the other to form a single image, usually a .tiff file, which should have processing and image “noise” (seen usually as some type of graininess) reduced and hopefully the interesting part of the image a little clearer. Then “sharpening”, which tries to change the contrast pixel to pixel to make the image sharper (as well as other things like deconvolution) is applied to render the best, sharpest image possible. The change here was to NOT normalize the separate frames (try to make the histograms the same or similar) and apply the sharpening routine using the default setting rather than using the gaussian setting. Note to self, changing the step size to 1 from 0 also helped. I'm still not pleased with the overall clarity of the image; it's just that this is one of the more clear ones.

Also on September 7^th, I imaged other targets: M21, an open cluster and NGC6572, a very small planetary nebula.

M21

As is becoming usual for me, M21 is imaged in only the luminescent channel; so a black and white image.

Ngc6572. Blue dot is the nebula.

NGC6572, however, is a LRGB or full color image. The nebula is seen as a blue dot just above the center of the image. This image target is much more typical of what we would see in the night sky in terms of size and brightness. Most of the other targets I have imaged are of the “showcase” variety. The arrow in the image below points to the nebula.