YES! The glorious solar corona!! A wonderfully chaotic corona with the sun being so active. I should make a comparison image between my 2017, 2019, and 2024 shots.
The corona is the sun's tenuous outer atmosphere, consisting of charged particles being bent and swayed by the sun's chaotic and ever-changing magnetic field. The charged particles follow the magnetic field lines, tracing out shapes that can only be seen when the sun's intense light is blocked by the perfectly-sized moon (or in the case of the SOHO spacecraft, an obscuration disk).
This one took me a while to get approximately what I wanted...the Pellett method of combining different exposure times that worked so well in 2017 and 2019 with my DSLR data just wasn't quite getting me there, but then I saw a couple mentions of the Larson-Sekamina process in PixInsight for contrast enhancement, which I hadn't actually tried before. After using FFTRegistration to stack them (thanks Phil Creed!), something I forgot one could do, I applied L-S with an amount of 0.2 and a little deringing, and it came out nice! After some tweaking in Photoshop and overlaying a not-blown-out moon and prominences, I got better than I could hope for in terms of the corona with the high clouds we had!
This image consists of only four exposures, actually, ranging from 2 ms (1/500s) to 20 ms (1/50s), but I took the 20 ms image and stretched it 6 times using CurvesTransformation to bring out the outer edges, saturating the inner corona, and saving each image as I went. I have longer exposures, but the clouds made for very sharp transitions, which just wasn't working well. Taken with my ZWO ASI2600MC Pro on my Takahashi FSQ-106N using a sequence I wrote for NINA.
Comments