Sunspot 2571

Date of image 08/08/2016

Sunspot 2571 near the middle of the solar disk.

Hardware details: Camera: Canon 550D in 640x480 movie crop mode. Exposure 1/1000s, ISO auto mode, 60 fps. Telescope: SW Skymax 150 Maksutov no filter. Mount: EQ5 pro.

Clouds limited the recording to about 5 minutes in total. The movie length taken here was about 1m:30s. I was noticing turbulence near the end of the recording, probably caused by the telescope tube heating up. I have since covered the scope with aluminium foil to reduce the heating. I actually got lucky with the focusing and I didm;t need to alter it much had a number of attempts at this SS because of cloud is issues with focusing.

Polar alignment was pretty good considering I used only a compass. Practice makes perfect!

Processing was first done with Pipp, which decompressed the .mov files and rejected 60% of bad frames. I then pass the uncompressed .avi to Rigistax, where I align, reject the remaining 90% of frames leaving about ~200 frames and then stack the result. The stacked image is then processed with the first wavelet strongly increased relative to the other wavelets. The gamma curve is adjusted to increase contrast. The final image is then cropped to reeve the grainy (poorly sampled) edges.

I like the granulation here and the detail in the small spots.