THE SUN IN HYDROGEN ALPHA
By: Christopher Go
I acquired a Coronado Solarmax 60 from OPT (Thanks John Downs!) on the 1st week of February so that I can view the Venus Transit on June 8 this year in Hydrogen Alpha! It is the most expensive filter that I have ever purchased. It is almost as expensive as when I got my AP130 EDF! After days of cloudy skies I had my first light on February 13. I was hooked the first time I saw prominences!! Thanks to the guys at CIG for making this wonderful filter readily available to us. I am now seeing RED!!
All images here were take with my Solarmax 60 on my Astrophysics AP130EDF mounted on my AP900GTO mount. I used my Toucam Pro as my imager which is mounted to a BF10 Blocking Filter. Image processing was done with Registax and Photoshop. Paul Hyndman's Pseudo flat is applied is most images!
June 6, 2005 Here's an image of AR 775 and 776 in HAlpha using a Toucam Pro webcam. AR776 is growing and hopefully will produce some flares soon!
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May 2, 2005 Here's an image of AR 756 and 757 in HAlpha using Tomio's Atik 1HS cam. No flares for now though... Pseudo Flat was applied to this image.
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Janaury 17, 2005 Here's an image of a C Class flare at the edge of the solar disk. It occurred at an area I least expected for a flare to occur. I was hoping a flare would erupt on 720 (lower right) but not occurred while I took these images. Pseudo Flat was applied to this image. **UPDATE: I just received news that Coronado Founder David Lunt has passed away 3 hours after I took this image. My condolences to Gerry, Nick and the rest of the Coronado Family whom I met during HOTS 2004!! David, here's a small Flare and BIG Prom for you!! Thanks for spreading the Solar Gospel!
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Janaury 14, 2005 Here's an image of the big sunspot group AR 10720. This is an image 2 hours after an M1 flare erupted in this group. Hopefully more flares will erupt soon! Pseudo Flat was applied to this image.
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December 19, 2004 I spent the night with Japanese Planetary Imager Tomio Akutsu. Tomio will be leaving for Japan next week so this will be our last imaging session together until next year. The sky was clear early in the evening and we were able to image Comet Machholz. When we were about to image the planets clouds started rolling in! We called it the night and woke up at around 4am to image Jupiter only to find overcast skies. At around 7:30am the sky was clear and we tried to view the sun despite the absence of big active regions. To our surprise the sun was FILLED WITH PROMINENCE! For the two images, we used Tomio's ATIK 1HS II monochrome camera and the results are fantastic! Much better than my Toucam. These images on the right was taken using Color Optimized Non-RAW mode (CONR). While the image of the Prominces was taken using standard mode! Approximately 130 frames were stacked both the surface and the prominence details.
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Copyright 2004 Christopher Go (christone@pacific.net.ph)