The Sun in May 2011

The following images were produced using a Baader white light filter on an ETX125 telescope using a Nikon950 digital camera

and a Coronado Personal Solar Telescope (PST) and an SC1a modified webcam for the hydrogen alpha images.

 

2011 May 01

A couple of details of Active Regions, plages and filaments.

 

 

2011 May 02

Whole disc with details of Active Region 1203 with a couple of close-ups below.

 

2011 May 02

I wasn't too happy with the way my PST was performing as the "sweet spot" was restricting the area I could image.

I decided to "realign" the pentaprism inside the focusing unit to give a more even illumination in the hope that I could put some mosaics together.

The result was far from perfect, but an improvement on what I had before.

 

 

2011 May 04

Today, I had my most successful PST imaging session.

 

The Sun wasn't particularly impressive in white light.

AR1203 is now fairly central with the trailing group now designated as AR1204.

 

I'm now achieving more even illumination across the webcam chip attached to my PST. I'm able to produce some mosaics but not across the whole disc.

Move your mouse cursor across the images below to see a "colourised" version of the image.

 

 

This is a mosaic of three panes, stitched together using Microsoft ICE.

The eastern limb sported a magnificent prominence which I imaged about every 2 minutes for over half an hour. The images which resulted were not all of the same quality the individual frames in the resulting animation are not at equal time intervals. The animation was produced in K3CCDTools, following the advice give in Jan Timmermans' web site. Jan must also be given the credit for the Photoshop action used to add colour to the solar disc images which were produced on a webcam with a B&W chip.

 

2011 May 30

The weather and other things meant that  I didn't manage to image the Sun again until May 30th, and that was a fleeting glimpse through cloud.

Move your mouse over the image to see details of the Active Region designations.

Details of the eastern limb.

Closeup of AR11227 and 1228