The Sun - 19 Feb 2014

[David Smith]

Had some time today and quite a decent sized gap in the clouds again so shot the usual round of 130ish but then had a play with some filters to see what the effect was. I tried a #56 Green "planetary" filter which I use all the time to bring out detail visually, a UHC and an OIII filter. All of these reduce quite significantly the amount of light hitting the 1100D's sensor and consequently I had to adjust the exposure. Details (and imges) below, suffice to say I am not convinced on the effectiveness of the OIII and UHC filters but the jury is still out on the green - opinions welcomed! All of these images were processed in exactly the same way (converted to TIFF, stretched and cropped in PIPP, Stacked in R5.1 and finished in Gimp2.6 - again identical steps for each stack) so as to provide a clean comparison.

First up the routine white light shot as normal with the Baader white light film, 135 x 1/1600th@ISO 100. 34 frames stacked.

201402019 by David_The_Bears_Fan, on Flickr

Second the #56 Green filtered image, 135 x 1/1250th@ISO 400, 57 frames stacked.

201402019Green by David_The_Bears_Fan, on Flickr

Third the OIII filtered image, 131 x 1/500th@ISO 400, 58 frames stacked.

201402019OIII by David_The_Bears_Fan, on Flickr

Lastly the UHC filtered image, 131 x 1/1250th@ISO 200, 76 frames stacked.

201402019UHC by David_The_Bears_Fan, on Flickr

[todd8137]

Very nice not done any solar stuff for ages these are looking good ,great work

Pat

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Very nice comparison. I will need a bigger screen than my phone to study the details properly.

[Steve Ward]

Good to see the blue stretched down your way ...  

Prefer the OIII personally but I may be a little biased ... 

To be honest I couldn't get a decent image with the 1100D whichever combination I used , including the wedge , so I dumped it for another 1000D ... 

[Luke]

Very nice shots as usual I'm gonna vote green, I think I can see a bit more definition, especially on the smaller spots, though it looks a very slight touch noisier to me. I really do think you are in the land of personal preference here!

[Montana]

Great shots :) to be honest I don't see much difference between them

Alexandra

[David Smith]

It is quite difficult to see the difference on here. The original images show a considerable difference in the detail between the unfiltered / green and the OIII / UHC filtered shots. The #56 green filter seems to bring out the faculae but the increased ISO seems to cause a similar increase in noise. To get the best here I think I would need to switch to ND3.8 to allow me to use the short exposures with the #56 filter.