Solar Astrophotography

The sun can be seen illuminating the back end of the Wedge.

It has been difficult for me to get out at night lately to view the night sky with a telescope. We don't get crisp, clear nights all that often and especially in the summer. My health problems don't help in this cause either because quite often I am left too exhausted by the time we finish dinner. The real icing on the cake lately has been a roaming bear in our neighborhood at night and I really have no desire to bump into a roaming bear in the dark! Needless to say, it has been difficult to get out at night for some astronomy in recent weeks.

The aforementioned nighttime viewing problems got me wondering about giving daytime solar astronomy a try. To make a long story short, I found that all I need to do to view the sun is replace one part of my telescope with a part that is designed specifically for viewing the sun... then add a filter or two... then I can view the sun with my own telescope and shoot images with my usual Sony camera body. This opened bright daylight to my astronomy and astrophotography options. 

The part I needed for viewing the sun arrived last week and it came with one variable neutral density filter. I should also add another filter called a Continuum Filter to help add some detail to the sun so I will be purchasing one of them soon. 

Since you cannot and should not look directly at the sun even with the naked eye, I removed my finderscopes. To get the telescope aligned to the sun without a finderscope, I just point it as best I can (which is easy and gets me exceptionally close) then I can view the sun on the back of the Solar Wedge. The back of the Wedge is ceramic and is illuminated by the sun when the telescope is pointed in the correct direction. This works incredibly well as you can see in the first photo, above.

Here is my first attempt at Solar Astrophotography...

First attempt at photographing the sun with my telescope.

Unfortunately, we are in a slightly unusual cycle right now...  there are absolutely no sun spots facing Earth. This is great for my health and breathing but it makes for a rather boring shot that looks like an orange sphere...  almost like the fruit!  If I add a Continuum Filter, I should be able to pick up a little more detail in the surface of the sun too which would make it appear even more like an orange (the fruit) because it would add some texture similar to an orange. When there are sunspots it makes viewing the sun a bit more interesting. 

For anyone interested in the details... the telescope is an Explore Scientific 102mm ED scope... with a Meade Solar Wedge installed with a built-in variable neutral density filter... a Baader Hyperion 17mm eyepiece... the eyepiece image is then projected directly onto my Sony a6000 sensor.  The telescope is an f7, the shutter speed was 1/3200th of a second, at ISO 100. I shot only five images to stack but probably should have stacked at least ten images. The Solar Wedge provides a white light spectrum but then I imaged in false color to bring it back to a natural sun color.

Overall I'm slightly disappointed in the lack of detail and sunspots, however, this is a great start in this type of unique astrophotography. I plan to do a little more experimenting and I look forward to trying this with the Continuum Filter when some sunspots are on our side of the sun. 

I'm really happy with this first attempt at Solar Astrophotography though!