The sun has become pretty active lately. Unlike the moon, the sun changes very fast. It’s dynamic with flares, sunspots, spicules, filaments, and prominences. I took these with my big refractor, the Daystar Quark Chromosphere eyepiece, and the ZWO 174mm camera. The power on these is large, but I don’t know a way to say the power in numbers. The telescope is 805mm in focal length then there is a 4.2x power in the eyepiece to magnify it even more. So these images are very close up.
These images seem to come from the southern hemisphere of the sun. I was using an EQ mount and the orientation can be confusing. I’ll work on that for future shooting sessions. The orientation I assume is from solar observatory images taken that day.
1. First image I took in a line going down the surface of the sun. On the darker edge there’s some spicules poking out of the sun.2. Some sun spots closeup. There is also some dark waves moving around the sun spots, They are the filaments, which are the same as prominences except they are on the side of the sun facing earth. Prominences are on the edge of the sun as seen from earth. 3. This is just a little bit further down to a different area of the sun. Same as above with sunspots and filaments.4. Again just a little further across the surface.5. A little further with more sunspots and filaments.6. I don’t know what you would call that brighter area there. This is just a little further across the surface from the previous images.7. This is the final image in a string that were overlapped. I wish there was a way to merge them, and there probably is but I haven’t found it. Microsoft ICE has been used before for lunar images, but solar doesn’t work so well in ICE. This would be an area known as temperate zones if it were on earth. It was 1/2 way between the solar pole and the solar equator.
The below images seem to come from the northern hemisphere of the sun, but the orientation on EQ mounts is very confusing. I get that from observatory images of the same day.
1. Here the images start in another temperate zone between the other pole and solar equator.2. This area was below the 1st image in this section.3. The final image from this temperate zone of the sun. There’s some spicules and even a small prominence around the edge of the solar surface.
