Sun 17th Oct. White light

[Astrokev]

Here's an attempt to image the sun using a 420mm prime lens. 3 main sunspot groups and faculae can be clearly seen, with a couple of small spots developing just above centre of disk.

18 images @ 1/3200s f8, stacked in Registax with some tweaking in CS3.

Fairly low tech approach to getting the shot, so comments for improvement welcomed.

More images on my Blog - link below.

Edit: Just noticed that there seems to have been a colour shift between my original and the posted version. The original is an 8 bit jpeg, colorised to a pale yellow/orange to make it more pleasing on the eye, but the uploaded version seems to have a slight green cast. Can anyone explain why this may have occurred?

Edit 2: Also noticed that I'm now a "Star Forming". Seems appropriate with my first sun image post!

[brianb]

That's an excellent full disk white light shot ... looks easy but is actually very hard to do! Don't change anything major, your technique is working very well ....

[teh_orph]

Nice work. If this is made of 18 images, did you have some images that didn't have the edge of the sun in it? If so, when you were stacking them what features did you use to align the images?

[jgs001]

Nicely done Kev

[russ]

Superb image Kev. You've really picked up all the detail nicely.

[Nick Smith]

The focus looks bang on there Kev, great job

Nick

[Astrokev]

Nice work. If this is made of 18 images, did you have some images that didn't have the edge of the sun in it? If so, when you were stacking them what features did you use to align the images?

Thanks to all for the comments. I have to say I was quite pleased with the result.

Regarding the 18 subs, all images captured the whole disk. I simply cropped each sub in PS so that the disk was roughly in the centre of the crop, and then stacked.

No idea what align settings I used, I was following my nose somewhat, with a bit of trial and error thrown in! I must learn the finer points of Registax. There's probably loads more I need to learn in PS aswell!

One way of improving the image would obviously be starting with a bigger image size to increase resolution. This probably means I'll have to hook up to the scope.