The day started up capturing the most visible prominences on the Sun. There were six that stood out. I took 500 frames of each. Nothing special about that. Seeing was a bit below average. Once they were processed, I thought it would be interesting to place them on a round disk (like a sun) in the correct position. That took a bit of time and scale adjustment, but eventually it was accomplished. Now I had a blackened out disk with the six proms placed on it. The remaining background outside of the sun disk was also black. I didn't like that. So how best to fill in the remainder of the area around the sun without taking and processing another 10-15 featureless captures and trying to fit them all together like a puzzle?
I had several ideas. First I made an artificial radial gradient in Photoshop and placed it behind the disk and prom image. That kind of worked, but I didn't like it. Then the idea came to me. Why not use a low-resolution image from the solar observatory as found on space Weather Live (
https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity.html). But which one to use? They have a number of images there. The one that seemed most relevant was the Solar flares image. Yes it is green and pretty small, but that can be changed in Photoshop (again with PS. No this isn't a commercial for PS, it's just a tool). Taking that image, adjusting the color to sort of match my images and adjusting the size to also match, I had what I wanted, a low resolution image of the rest of the rim of the solar disk.
This was put in as a background lightening layer (again with the PS inference
.) and I had my completed image that you see here.
Hope you enjoy this, and please make your comments on the process.
Eric
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