In preparation for the solar eclipse on April 8th, I set up and took some test shots of the sun today for the first time ever. This is one I decided to process as a single shot, no stacking.
The sunspots visible from top to bottom are (I've included a revision so on hover you can see them annotated):
3633 - top near center
3628 - largest one upper right
3632 - small one to the right of 3628 (largest one upper right)
3629 - couple of smaller ones at the bottom center
3630 - couple of very faint small ones bottom left
For my set up and gain (100), I found 1/2000th (0.0005) of a second was my ideal exposure.
I used the new SolarToolBox kit for Pixinsight that Bill Blanshan and team put together. It worked great and made things very easy, especially given I'm only using a white filter (Celestron Eclipsmart). I did find I had to use Curves afterwards still to boost brightness a bit more, but that could just be me using the tool for the first time (I had it's brightness set to 1 - max which was default). This was a very quick post process in Pixinsight, nothing fancy only the SolarToolbox and Curves for brightness.
I'll be at my grandfather-in-laws near the very center of the eclipse, so I'll get nearly 4 minutes of totality. Now we'll just wait and see if the weather cooperates, and my first time capturing an eclipse goes smoothly
I've got a sequence in N.I.N.A. set up to effectively auto bracket exposures every minute for partial (since I know my sweet spot is 0.0005s at 100 Gain now, I may not bracket afterall), and every 10 seconds during totality (this will definitely be bracketed from 1/8000th up to 1s to hopefully capture as much of the corona as possible), so we'll see how things go. Let's hope I remember to remove the filter during totality and keep my vision during the entire process
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