I am starting to prepare for next year’s total solar eclipse. This means refreshing my memory on the procedures and set up of my mobile telescopes, mounts and cameras.
I took this image using one of my very first webcams: a TIS DMK21AU04. The camera is long out of production but as you can see, this one still works. It has a very low resolution of 640×480 and that is very obvious in this picture. I have much higher resolution cameras, but I think this will be fine to live stream the eclipse given the chance. It is also much easier to set up and configure. The telescope is my Hydrogen-Alpha telescope which allows us to view the thin layer of the Sun’s atmosphere known as the chromosphere.
Sun (HA:225×0.2ms)
You can see several dark thin thread-like filaments in the image. This is solar material being held off the surface by magnetic fields and because it is above the surface it is cooler and thus darker. The patchy bright areas are locations of increased magnetic strength known as plage.