{"id":788,"date":"2012-03-30T13:29:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T13:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/?p=788"},"modified":"2020-06-01T12:34:21","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T12:34:21","slug":"solar-imaging-from-the-backyard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/?p=788","title":{"rendered":"Solar Imaging from the Backyard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It is possible to take useful images of the Sun with modest equipment from a simple backyard location.<\/span><\/p>\n

This past Saturday, after counting sunspots and sunspot groups visually, I hooked up a\u00a0 Meade LPI webcam to the telescope to record a\u00a0 sunspot group associated with NOAA Active Region 11445<\/a>.\u00a0 AR 11445<\/a> was just rotating into view from the Sun\u2019s southeast limb.<\/span><\/p>\n

The top\u00a0 image is from my small (150mm)\u00a0 reflector telescope. The telescope mount does not have a drive to turn the telescope in synch with the Earth’s rotation,\u00a0 so the Sun\u2019s image drifted through the field of view while I captured a stream of images as video sequence. I used the free Registax<\/a> software to align, stack, and slightly process twenty-one of the best images from the video sequence.\u00a0 The dark smudge under the sunspots was caused by a large fleck of dust inside the imaging device.<\/span><\/p>\n

For comparison,\u00a0 the bottom image shows the same area of the Sun taken at exactly the same time by NASA\u2019s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory.\u00a0\u00a0 Both images were taken on March 25, 2012, at 16:35:34 UT.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This is my solar observing rig. \u00a0 It consists of a 150mm f\/9 Newtonian reflector, an Orion full aperture solar filter, and a Meade LPI webcam.\u00a0 The telescope aperture is stopped to 80mm by a piece of black felt with a circular cut-out on the inside of the solar filter.\u00a0 The LPI images are captured as a video stream on a netboook computer using K3CCD Tools<\/a>. The netbook is just barely visible on the table beside the telescope.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is possible to take useful images of the Sun with modest equipment from a simple backyard location. This past Saturday, after counting sunspots and sunspot groups visually, I hooked up a\u00a0 Meade LPI webcam to the telescope to record a\u00a0 sunspot group associated with NOAA Active Region 11445.\u00a0 AR 11445 was just rotating into view from the Sun\u2019s southeast limb. The top\u00a0 image is from my small (150mm)\u00a0 reflector telescope. The telescope mount does not have a drive to turn the telescope in synch with the Earth’s rotation,\u00a0 so the Sun\u2019s image drifted through the field of view while I captured a stream of images as video sequence. I used the free Registax software to align, stack, and slightly process twenty-one of the best images from the video sequence.\u00a0 The dark smudge under the sunspots was caused by a large fleck of dust inside the imaging device. For comparison,\u00a0 the bottom image shows the same area of the Sun taken at exactly the same time by NASA\u2019s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory.\u00a0\u00a0 Both images were taken on March 25, 2012, at 16:35:34 UT.   This is my solar observing rig. \u00a0 It consists of a 150mm f\/9 Newtonian reflector, an Orion full aperture solar filter, and a Meade LPI webcam.\u00a0 The telescope aperture is stopped to 80mm by a piece of black felt with a circular cut-out on the inside of the solar filter.\u00a0 The LPI images are captured as a video stream on a netboook computer using K3CCD Tools. The netbook is just barely visible on the table beside the telescope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=788"}],"version-history":[{"count":159,"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1995,"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions\/1995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/astronotes.offworldventures.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}