Contains:  Solar system body or event
Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin

Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin

Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Acquisition details

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Description

My seeing is usually only average at best, with the jet stream always overhead. But we had a long unusual stretch of 7 days in April with 20 to 30 C temperatures. This morning the seeing was rated as excellent, with high transparency, no wind and with a very still hot and humid air mass above. Even without any tuning, my initial look at the Sun was like nothing I had seen before, showing incredible detail. I spent a lot of time getting everything focused and my Etalon fine tuned, waiting for temperature on my sensor to stabilize near 38C, before starting this sequence! I have a lot more detail here from my prominence animation, if you want more details. 

As with my animation, I used AutoStakkert with 3X drizzle, then Topaz Sharpen AI, which is actually very subtle in sharpening: one can choose to remove motion blur, focus blur, or overall softness. I used Focus blur-very blurry at the AI generated settings and got a wonderful natural improvement in focus. 

This image is a mosaic of two images, since my sensor is too small to get the full N-S extent of the Sun. Photoshop merged the two images seamlessly. I did a curves adjustments to brighten the prominences, which are actually much fainter than the solar surface. I add a color fill layer in pure red which is the actual color through an Ha filter, adding it as a color burn. But I dropped the fill for the color layer, which keeps red for the darker areas, lightening the red for lighter features, while the brightest features end up white. This increased the contrast in the brighter areas in particular.

The dark streaks are filaments, these are prominences but highlighted against the Sun's surface, rather than at the limb. Filaments/prominences are areas where the sun's magnetic field has lifted gas above the photosphere. Compared to the photosphere surface they are cool and thus dark, while at the limb, they are bright relative to the corona.

The brighter spots are plages, these are bright hot regions in the Sun's chromosphere, which are controlled by the photospheric magnetic field concentration of the faculae below. The other bright filaments are spicules, which surround sunspots: they are thousands of km tall, but only hundreds wide. There is a very large circular region toward the south with plages and spicules, as well as sunspots.

And finally we see a lot of granulation, these are bubble of gas driven by convention heating from the core of the sun, the bright areas are rising areas of hot gas, around them are sinking areas of cooled gas. Typically these 1000 km areas last only 20 minutes, though supergranules, which can be as much as 30 times larger in size, can last for a few days.

Comments

Revisions

  • Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin
    Original
  • Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin
    B
  • Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin
    C
  • Final
    Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin
    D
  • Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin
    E

B

Title: Added uncolored version

Description: This is the version before adding the Ha coloration.

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Added version no drizzle or sharpening

Description: This version did not use drizzle or any sharpening at all, just curves adjustments and a 3X upscale in Photoshop to match the image size of the other images

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: No drizzle version, with Topaz Sharpen AI. The image looks cleaner and if anything the actual detail is better than with 3X drizzle.

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: No drizzle, Topaz Sharpen AI, and colored Ha red.

Uploaded: ...

Histogram

Solar surface and prominences mosaic in Ha with excellent seeing!!, Rick Veregin