12.08.2020
New aspect:
After imaging the sun during the transit of Mercury I decided that I wanted to try imaging the sun in it’s entire glory. So I took out the DSLR and my 750mm FL Newton telescope and gave it a try.
Image acquisition:
I took the image during noon on no particular interesting day to fill the ranks of my „solar system“ wall where I collect images of bodies within our solar system. I had not jet tried any fancy solar imaging after the Mercury transit in 2019.
So this time I choose the DSLR because this camera in combination with my scope gives me the field of view to fit the entire moon/sun [same apparent size in the sky] inside one frame.
During imaging it was unbelievable hot outside and I struggled to find focus or manage the exposure time correctly without any shade on my laptop. My screen just couldn’t hold up with the immense brightness of the core star of our solar system.
To manage the heat on the camera system I took one of the insulation styrofoam pieces and cut a 15cm hole right in the middle. Why that? Look for yourself:
The imaging itself was not very convenient. I lacked (and lack) the experience to image the sun properly. Problem when using the DSLR is always the „modus oppeandi“. I took a bunch of single images whereas you’d normally go for short and rapid image capture sequences such as video files. But the video format of my DSLR is not compatible with the processing program. So I ended in taking dozens of single raw images in the hope of processing them later.
Processing:
I took Autostakkert!2 and imported all the single exposures. That is a legit way. Autostakkert supports the import of image sequences exactly for that reason. But before importing them I needed to convert them into a readable format first (.cv2 to .tif). Then the problems begun:
I wasn’t able to set any „region of interest“ and/or make the program to align the images of the sun within the „surface“-mode properly. Because of that the resulting image is slightly sharper in the middle area but has nasty stacking artifacts on the outside.
Thereby I just scrolled through the dozens of images and chose the best one and… that was it. No final editing because the overall quality forbid something like this. An orange ball: That is my first sun!