This week’s object is not deep-sky, it’s our closest star – the Sun. And look at the beauty of our nearest star as captured by Selsey astronomer Pete Lawrence. What a truly remarkable image – I would have that blown up to A0 and it would be framed on the wall over the fireplace, I would never grow tired of looking at it. Marvellous image Pete, and the details for capturing this superb image are provided by Pete below:
“This image of Sol was taken through a Solarscope SF70 double-stacked h-alpha filter set fitted to a Vixen FL-102S refractor. The camera used was a Lumenera SKYnyx 2-0M high frame-rate planetary camera. This is a 9-pane mosaic, each pane being distilled out of a collection of around 500 still images, processed in Registax. The 9 processed panes were then manually stitched together to produce as smooth a full disk image as possible and flattened. The main disk was selected and copied as a separate layer allowing me to process the surface and prominence regions separately. False colours were applied to the original monochrome captures using a levels adjustment. Then following a few contrast and levels tweaks, both layers were merged together to produce the end result.”
All that hard after-acquisition processing sure paid off with this one Pete – a truly lovely, and awe-inspiring image 🙂
Lovely choice, Greg…and great work Pete.