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Saturday, August 05, 2017

Eclipse photography practice.

The August 21st Solar Eclipse is just 16 days away so it's time to practice some setup and photography of the Sun.  In this case, I used my Canon 6D with its full frame sensor on my Celestron EdgeHD 8 inch telescope and a white light solar filter.  For the eclipse, I'll use a 0.7x focal reducer to get a bigger field of view for the phenomena around the Sun and Moon.
This is the full image with some sharpening and contrast stretching.  The C8 is an f/10 telescope with 2032mm focal length.  You an see some sunspots a little left and below the center of the Sun.  You can also see lots of granulation on the Sun in general and I was hoping to see a little more activity.  The eclipse is on August 21st, 16 days after this image, so given that the synodic rotation period of the Sun is about 27 days, this sunspot group will be on the other side of the Sun, at least a few days from coming around the edge.  This exposure was 1/1000 seconds at ISO 200 using my Canon 6D.

This is a closeup of the image above to get a better look at the small sunspot group.  You can see at least three sunspots in the group and maybe a couple more small ones if you use your imagination a little.  The Sun was getting a bit low in the sky, so there is some atmospheric color dispersion - the top of the spot looks a little red while the bottom looks a little blue.

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