Solar Imaging

Currently I’m working with two setups to do solar imaging:

a Meade 4.5″ ETX with a Baader filter connected to a Philips SPC900 webcam using SharpCap for capture and then AVIStack2 to stack and post process.   The main problem with this setup is you’ll need a focal reducer because the zoom from the webcam is so far into the image the field of view only covers a very small slice of the sun – good for magnification, terrible for imaging sometimes.  These images are in black and white.

or

a Coronado Solarmax 40 with the same camera mentioned above – and the same problem without a focal reducer.  The beauty of this scope are the on board inline filter trains.  You can instantly adjust different wavelengths of the hydrogen lines, so you’ll see the granulation, prominences, and the different layers those wavelengths appear in.  These images appear red from the filters.

Here are a few of the better images I’ve gotten so far.