Faculae on limb (20-07-2016)

Date of image 20/07/2016

Equipment: SW Skymax 150 (f12) at prime focus with a home-made Baader solar film filter (full aperture). The telescope was mounted on an EQ5 pro. Camera: Canon 550D in 640x480 movie crop mode set at 1/640s exposure ISO800, the frame rate was 60fps.

This photo was edited by my wife (she goes by the alias of SNova here!). We were just playing about with the settings on Registax - the only true way to learn! It was difficult to bring out the structure of the Faculae without producing significant ringing artefacts at the limb. SNova did bring down this effect using the de ringing tool without the smoothing being too obvious. Good job!

The total movie duration was about 3 minutes. The best 40% of frames were selected and decompressed by Pipp, Stacking and editing was done with RegiStax 6. I can't remember the number of alignment points. I think about 100 frames made it into the final stack.

The weather was good with some turbulence. Tracking was OK considering the crude PA.