27th-29th July 2008, Solar Granulation
by Maxim Usatov

This page is heavy on images but it is worth waiting..

View this shot in 150% QE Superresolution Size (1 Mb JPEG)

Here's the 150% scale MAP colored version shot (~700 Kb), 1300x1000 pixels: JPEG

The seeing conditions were 2/5 as Prague is in Central Europe and the image was taken on the terrace, 4/4 floor house. Transparency was 4/5 - pretty clear sky. A 7nm Baader deep sky H-alpha filter was used as the red filter to keep turbulence effect as low as possible. There was lots of processing involved in getting these shots out. Initially, I took 5 reels x 2,700 frames each. Only 2nd reel showed to be having the most lucky frames. 90 frames were selected and stacked for non-multipoint alignment session and 150 frames were selected for the first MAP grayscale shot. Aligned, optimized and stacked in Registax 4. Then both images were deconvolved with Lucy-Richardson algorithm in MaximDL, 0.8 pixels PSF, 7 iterations. Photoshop was used to add color for the second and third shots, then some final level (histogram) stretches.