Quote from: Lucius on July 19, 2025, 03:04:00 PM

You're probably aware that there was a recent, what they call, "colossal eruption" on the Sun - I wonder if you have any footage of that? One picture from the article shows a "canyon of fire" as long as 250,000 miles - it looks unreal...

Addendum:
I was poking my nose into the books on sun photography over the weekend. What i got is a sun filter, which just blocks 99,99% of the sunlight, over the whole visible spectrum. It was good to learn that i'd better use an additional IR/UV block filter in front of the camera/eyepiece, to avoid infrared exposure of may eyes, as well as UV leaking through tiny punctures in the sunlight filter foil or its coating.
However, with this equipment and the use of another $300 narrowband filter (430nm, 0.5 to 2nm wide) i would be able to make quite decent pictures of the sun, if i'm lucky and there are some spots. A short video with a few hundred decent frames would give me a sharp picture after processing.

The picture above was created using a different method, which i'm definitely looking to try in the future: Heliospectrography.
It needs additional equipment, namely a spectroheliograph, which puts a piece of glass, coated to block light but with a tiny, tiny slit in it, into the path of light at the focuser end of the telescope. The slit is projecting a slice of sunlight onto a prism, and depending on the angle of the prism, the camera mounted at the end of the spectroheliograph captures the thin line of light in a single wavelength. So you set up a telescope, but instead of tracking the sun, like you would do with the sunblocking filter to get a lot of stackable image frames, you would fix its position so that the sun is slowly passing the viewport. This way you get thousands of slim slices of wavelength filtered light, which would be assembled by software to deliver a photo like the one you posted.

The spectroheliograph is about $1k+, even less as a DIY device, but you'd need to 3D print so parts using temperature-resistant filament, or mill them from metal and blacken them.

My AuDHD brain has a new black hole to dive into, which tastes like a "bonus" to me.
Or it isn't because it will likely distract me from doing possibly more important tasks, again Roll Eyes

However, thanks Bitcoin, because i don't have to save so much of my worthless fiat to rot on my bank account, and i'm still able to invest in rather expensive hobbies Cool