Sun and moon combo: I finally got some OK skies overnight last night and few enough clouds to shoot through during the day today to get another moon/sun combo. These images were captured a little over 9 hours apart.
Seeing the northern lights with my own eyes was an amazing experience this weekend! I wrote up a blog post about it and assembled a new video. Check it out!
Not a great image, because I was shooting around the clouds but I had to capture the source of our Aurora fun. That big chunk on the right side has been blasting us with solar mass to light up the sky!
Total cloud cover when I went to bed, no aurora for me last night. Here’s a view of the sun just now and the big spot causing all of the fuss. Desaturated to remove lens aberration colors. #sun#solarFlare#sunSpots
So if the internet and power are knocked out this weekend, you can smugly tell your friends and family who are oblivious to today's sunspot activity: "It's solar storms. I knew that was a risk this weekend…" and then set about trying to break down your bookshelves and chairs for the bonfire that will cook your supper.
If you have a solar filter or glasses left over from the eclipse in North America and Canada, go check out the sun right now! Amazing cluster of sunspots visible!
Finally! A clear day for some solar imaging and what a view today! My phone has been buzzing all day as all of these spots are firing off solar flares.
Last Friday, I set out to do something fun: capture the rotation of the sun! The challenge with this is that the sun rotates very slowly - roughly one rotation every 27 days. I captured images every 5 minutes from about 8AM to 5PM and then stuck them all together in a time lapse.
The sun and moon captured about 6 hours apart on April 23. The sun was super active with tons of sunspots and the moon was 100% full. I captured the moon right after it cleared the trees and the color is unedited.
Both were captured from my backyard with my QHY168C camera and EQ6-R mount. I used a homemade solar filter with Thousand Oaks film for the sun shots.
Today at noon there was a fantastic solar transit of the ISS near home; sadly the clouds covered the sun in that moments. Besides the low altitude passage and the consequent relative size of the ISS, the background would be rich in #sunspots, as you can see in this later shot. #backyardastronomy #astrophotography
I wasn't planning to do any solar imaging yesterday, but I changed my mind once I saw what the sunspots were up to! That large sunspot region is cranking out solar flares at an impressive rate. Hopefully I'll get another chance to image on a clearer day before they disappear around the side.
It was not a good day for solar imaging, but I pointed my scope (with solar filter, of course) at the sun and waited for a break in the clouds. I finally got a bit of one and captured 2000 frames of video. Normally, I tell the software to pick the top 25%, but that stack had weird artifacts. Lowering to 5% produced a really nice image, which might be my favorite yet.