I set up the Vixen ed81s 81mm doublet APO refractor in the backyard yesterday (5/25) for some white light viewing of the sun, taking advantage of clear skies and nice weather. After a little observing visually I hooked up a camera to capture what I was seeing, since otherwise I’d just keep enjoying the view via a Vixen 7mm low-dispersion Lanthanum eyepiece with about a 55 degree view that captured all of the sunspot regions perfectly. I also had the smaller 40mm Coronado PST telescope tracking to view in Hydrogen Alpha bands, and just take in all of the activity going on up there, including a very large filament, a large prominence  and a region of prominences opposite of that large one. For the smaller PST, I like to use an Orion E-Series 7-21mm Zoom Eyepiece which is pretty low cost and effective, allowing me to pack a kit for easy setup and pick out wide details via a 22mm view, then lock in on detail a little more down to 7mm which was the sweet spot today. This scope requires some eye training, to get familiar with shading your eyes, then spotting features, but it’s worth it. Both of these telescopes are grab-and-go size, and I’ll bring them out to our solar open house in June at the Milwaukee Astronomical Society if it’ll be clear skies.

What stole the show to me were three regions of sunspots. Technically there were 153 the day this photo was taken! Can you spot them all amidst the granules we can see from the sun’s convection? Here’s the full disk image, which was shot with two sets of .AVI videos via an ASI1600mm mono camera with an Astrodon luminance filter, through a safely filtered Baader Herschel wedge with Baader Solar Continuum filter and an ND filter applied. 

To point out a few, I grabbed a few frames just on the features, so there is a big one, about four times the size of Earth, which could likely be seen in eclipse glasses right now, AR3310 in the lower right of the full disk image. AR3310 was responsible for this M-class solar flare, which at M9.6, caused a radio blackout 9 days ago, May 16. In another region, AR3315, has apparently has grown to a similar size in just 24 hours since first being spotted on May 23. It has produced a lot of C-class flares so far, or minor flares which are long in duration so far. Then stretching in the southern area of the solar disk is what looks like a line of sunspots, which contains AR3311, with a large beta-gamma magnetic field that is producing many M-class solar flares, according to Spaceweather.com. 

To make setup/takedown quick, I enjoy using the ASIair+ to grab shots. For processing then of these two 2 minute .AVI files which is roughly 5,000 frames for the full disk shot, I sent both sets into AutoStakkert! Software and kept 5% of the best frames, and applied normalized stack to about 50%. Once I have processed files, I took them into Microsoft Image Composite Editor, which despite being old legacy software, still combines mosaics surprisingly well. From there, a slight amount of Topaz deNoise sharpening was applied instead of using Registax. It’s nice to be in a routine to improve setup and takedown times for daytime observing, and wow does having a mount polar aligned and ready to go such a big help to take advantage of in between work projects. Also having no rain is a tremendous help, and the set scopes have probably reached their maximum now in anticipation for a clear Friday... My wife returned from a trip yesterday, to find three tripods living in the backyard… so no more are allowed unless I also pull dandelions for a long amount of time!