So what are these called? Solar thingys.

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

I was attempting to image some small solar prominences this afternoon using the Atik16HR and PST. The FITS files didn't look very promising but when I put them through Registax, I saw two very thin radial lines heading away from (looks like at least) the sun. Here's the picture with the wavelets adjusted to best show up the features.

Now I've never seen anything like this in bools or on webpages, but I'm certainly no expert. However I know a man who is hugely better qualified than myself and he hangs out here from time to time, so I thought I'd better post the image and see what it turns out to be.

I've ruled out camera issues as they invariably show up as vertical or horizontal anomalies (blooming and suchlike).

It can't be any kind of Cosmic ray thing hitting the chip as there are two lines on the image. One could show up and coincidentally look like it was radial to the sun, but two? Nah.

It doesn't appear on an individual frame that I can see, but I took about a hundred in an attempt to cure the poor seeing. If I stretched each FIT I might be able to track them down, but some idea of the timescale that these things exist for would help. For example, is this a dot moving frame by frame, or a laser beam looking thing?

Always something wierd happening up there when you look, isn't there?

Captain Chaos

[Andrew*]

what confuses me is that the "outline" of the sun is significantly darker to the outside of the rays, and in the between them the outline is less marked.

Nice pic. Very nice detail.

Pity there wasn't any sunspots to look at today.

Andrew

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

You're actually close to spotting the answer Andrew I think. Maybe more opinions would help. I think I've solved the mystery myself, but given the date I haven't let on yet what is going on.

Captain Chaos

[GordonCopestake]

They look like sprites, but i've never seen them on the sun before and given the scale they are about 12,000miles long. Astroman?

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Before anyone gets to spend a lot of time pondering this, I think they are artifacts from the three point alignment in Registax.

Captain Chaos

[stargazer1980]

Well i believe them to be 2 pieces of wire holding the sun in place! Afterall i think we are in a make believe world where everything around us is not what it appears to be lol! Basically its the sun being hung like a puppet to make us think there is a solar system!

Whacky idea i know but i thought it was a fun one

See Ya

Darren

[Astroman]

They're artifacts of some kind, CC. Not sure what, since I'm not familiar with the imaging SW or camera, but they're definitely not solar features.

Care to share your "solution"?

P.S. Internal reflections?

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Sorry AM, I thought that I'd been clear. I'd aligned the frames using Regitax chosing the three lumpy bits on the limb as alignment points. Registax then aligned these three panels and badly stitched them together, the artifacts are caused by the alignment error between the panels. The radial looking effect is caused by Registax splitting the panels halfway between the alignment points and the direction is therefore obvious.

Captain Chaos

[Astroman]

Ah, duh, so you said. :insects1: Never used Registax, so I'm unaware of its foibles.