Sonnenflecken / Sun Spots - 20220329This day started gray in gray after 2 weeks of beautiful clear weather and spring like temperatures, also with good to very good seeing over the last days. The sun was dim today, only very light shadows were casted by the trees and houses around.
Nevertheless the sun disk looked round and sharp, not blurred. I setup my 30x75 spotting scope to prove the seeing was good enough to give it at least a try ....
Yes – seeing still fine!So I started a session and took 150 photos with my usual camera settings. I realized this was not very helpful ... but I wanted to try out how low I could go with a very weak S/N ratio. I thought I'd get another chance later this afternoon.
* Have a look at my short
Seeing Animation (short video) made from the (ugly) single frames used for my image.
That was foolish!Nevertheless, now that I only had these severly underexposed images the challenge was indeed to peel something useful out of the data. After several PIPP preprocessing trials with increased thresholds and "gain", I successfully stacked the frames in Fitswork ... which looks frustrating.
My bad!After fiddling an hour or two with Darktable, I got what you can see now. After all, not too bad ... but could have been achieved in a much shorter time and easier, more reliable, workflow.
It was worth it despite the self invented trouble, because significant changes appeared on the sun disk over night:
*
Please compare my previous image!* See
NASA's capture as a reference.
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