First foray into Solar astronomy (from SGL8)

[Shibby]

In between the rain and clouds at SGL8, the sun peeked through every now and again, so I thought I'd try solar with my 150P. I cheated a lot and whipped up a solar filter by duct taping some solar film over the back of the small aperture hole on the end cap. It worked surprisingly well, giving us some nice views of the sun and many sun spots. The resolution would undoubtedly be better with a full aperture filter but I was happy nonetheless

I then popped my 450D on the scope and took some snaps. I didn't really know what I was doing and the detail varied but the following was probably the best, which was a single 1/100th shot at ISO 200. There are some truly stunning solar images on this forum but I'm reasonably happy with my first attempt so thought I'd post it. Any tips on how to achieve better results would be much appreciated! Stacking? Stop being lazy and make a full aperture filter??

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

The sun put up quite a show lately. Nice capture

[cgarry]

That is a great image for a single sub. For moving forward I would suggest.

* Grab around 100 raw images.

* Centre, crop and convert to monochrome TIFFs in PIPP (http://sites.google....-uasge/example3)

* Stack with RegiStax 6

* Apply wavelets with RegiStax 6.

* Final processing with your favorite image processing software.

Cheers,

Chris

[JamesF]

Agree with all that Chris has said, and I'd back off on the exposure time a fair bit and drop down to ISO100 as well. You have to find what works for your setup, but I'd try much shorter exposures and aim for a histogram fill of around 50%.

James

[Shibby]

Thanks for the great tips Chris & James, I'll definitely give that a go next time!

I'll drop to ISO 100 and try increasing the shutter speed; not sure I can go too much shorter on the exposure as the limited aperture is making the image a fair bit dimmer than it would otherwise be...

[JamesF]

Thanks for the great tips Chris & James, I'll definitely give that a go next time!

I'll drop to ISO 100 and try increasing the shutter speed; not sure I can go too much shorter on the exposure as the limited aperture is making the image a fair bit dimmer than it would otherwise be...

Yes, with just the filter on the cap you might be a bit short of light. I think I'd keep the exposure fairly fast, increase the ISO setting and stack plenty of images to help with the noise in that situation. Work from the histogram though, rather than making judgements from the display. If I go too high I seem to get light bleeding into the surrounding pixels and creating a halo around the image so I set myself an arbitrary maximum of 50% for the histogram.

James

[Montana]

A fantastic first attempt! you'll be hooked for life

Alexandra