Processing the Eclipse

Processing the frames to produce a deeper view of the solar corona is not easy. This is the best I have achieved so far. You can still see some ring like artifacts where the layers have been merged. I will be working further to improve this, but it may come down to retouching by hand to eliminate the issues.

The image is an HDR merge of five images taken from 1/500 to 1/4sec exposures with the TV-76 and a Canon EOS M5. Extensive corona and a couple prominences can be seen.

Solar Corona
An HDR view of the solar corona from the 21Aug2017 solar eclipse

The Solar Corona on Eclipse Day

With a quiet Sun, no active sunspot regions on the face or limb of the visible disk, one wonders what the solar corona will look like. What will we see when the Moon blots out the Sun and the corona is revealed.

MSLO K-Corona NRGF Image
The K-Coronagraph image from the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory from Aug 13, 2017
Unlike solar observers of old, we can look at the corona without waiting for an eclipse. We have both spacecraft and ground based telescopes equipped with coronagraphs. With these we can view the corona in real-time everyday!

Just up the hill from me is the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. I know a couple folks that work there and have toured the facility. MLSO is a fairly modest telescope equipped with some very specialized instruments. This telescope stares at the Sun all day, every day, monitoring our star as part of a worldwide network of solar observatories.

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