2013-04-14 Solar Activity
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After several days of more clouds and rain, we finally got at least a partly sunny day which allowed me to capture some solar images. At the left is a 4-panel mosaic of the solar disk in hydrogen alpha. Several sunspot groups can be seen (Active Regions) as well has numerous interesting prominences. This was take at the LS80's native focal length of 560mm. Each panel was 150 frames selected from 500 in Registax with wavelets applied. Mosaic stitching and post-processing was done in Photoshop CS5.
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Next are several close-up images take with the LS80 combined with a 2.5X Powermate, taking the focal length to 1400mm. I've been working on my solar processing techniques, which presents quite a few different challenges when compared to deep sky imaging. I've been messing with combinations of different filters along with using color balance shifting to add color to the images, as well as inverting the mono images to bring out more detail. While I like to see the images in color, I think it distracts from the detail.
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