White light webcam sunspots

[JamesF]

I was trying to get my son a bit more interested in the real world than the ones that exist inside various electronic games devices today and we agreed to try to use the telescope he normally uses, my ST102, to take some sunspot images. Unfortunately we didn't get very far as patience is as yet something of an alien concept to him, but here's what I ended up with.

Taken with a modded Lifecam Cinema and ST102 with Baader solar film filter on an EQ1 with RA motor. Not the ideal combination, but I was hoping the light levels would be good enough for the higher resolution webcam. As it was I didn't have enough control of the gain to get it down as far as was really required and as a result there's a serious lack of dynamic range. It was also a pig to stack and none of Registax v5, v6 or AS!2 really did a good job. This one is with AS!2 and there are still stacking artefacts all over the place, some fairly hideous. I stacked about half of 1000 frames taken at 15fps. It may well be that lower resolution would yield better results from a higher frame rate.

On the plus side, there's still clear granulation, the sunspots don't look at all unreasonable and there are clear faculae as well.

Unless one of the children begs me to I don't think this is something I'll pursue (though I am slightly tempted to have a go with the webcam in the Mak , but I reckon there's enough data there to suggest that if such a webcam was all you had then a bit of practice with the imaging and experimentation with the processing could well turn out some decent images.

James

[Montana]

It's a great image! one day he'll learn to have patience (I hope) and do all the testing and refining for you!

Alexandra