Nor'West News: November 11, 2021

4
Thursday November 11 2021
Capturing Sol in all its glory
THE
• From page 1
“It amazes me that we are
living in a time when we can
do something that’s been out
of reach of most amateurs
photographers up until now.
“With the help of an ordinary
refractive telescope and some
affordable specialist equipment
we can now see the sun up
close, it’s quite an experience to
look at it with your own eyes,”
he said.
Shankar said it’s all achieved
by using specialist filters and
some free online software.
“We start off with a white light
filter which lets all the colours
of the visible spectrum through,
but reduces them down to a tiny
percentage, less than one per
cent of what we see.
“This filter shows us the
photosphere of the sun, the layer
of the sun with all the sun spots
happening on it.”
Next he uses is a hydrogen
alpha optical filter designed
to transmit only a narrow
bandwidth of light.
“This filter only lets in a
wavelength of light that is
less than one nanometre
in size; a human hair is
600,000 nanometres in
thickness.
“It gives me amazing views
of a different layer of the sun’s
atmosphere, now I can now see
the chromosphere,” he said.
SOLAR FLARE: A big prominence exploding on the north
east limb of the sun, estimated as high as five or six
earths. Below – a small eruption is bigger than three
earths.
PHOTOS: SAI SHANKAR
This layer has the temperature
ranging from 6000 deg C to
about 20,000 deg C.
“You can still see sun spots
but you can now see
prominences exploding on the
edge of the sun plus a lot of
surface detail.
“It looks amazing and it’s
dynamic, over an hour it can
change immensely,” Shankar
said.
Using a monochromatic
video camera that captures at
100 frames per second, he then
records 30 seconds of imagery at
a time.
“The atmosphere of the sun
is quite turbulent so it’s called
‘lucky photography,’ as over that
30 seconds there will be brief
moments of clarity in the surface
turbulence.
“On screen, your watching
blurry images then suddenly it
jumps into clear sharp focus,“ he
said.
Free photographic stacking
software quickly sorts the
best one-to-five per cent of all
the images captured to produce
a clear, sharp result as a mosaic.
“It finds the best frames and
matches them together into a
black and white image which I
can then colourise to show the
sun.”
From there Shankar said he
will manipulate with them in
Photoshop and produce the
images he is becoming well
known for.
Shanker said he plans to
display his unique imagery
online in the coming weeks.
FACTS:
•The sun is Yellow Dwarf
star composed primarily of
hydrogen and helium.
•It is over 4.6 billion years old
and compared to the largest
known stars, red giants, isn’t
very big, but compared to
the most common type of
star in the universe, the red
dwarf, the sun is quite a bit
larger than most.
•The sun alone contains 99.8
per cent of the total mass in
our solar system.
•It’s almost 110 times the
diameter of earth.
•About one million earth’s
could fit inside the sun while
the surface area of the sun is
11,990 times that of earth.
•The sun is spinning in
the opposite direction to
earth and is travelling at
220km per second, light
takes eight minutes to reach
earth.
•The atmosphere of the
sun is composed of three
layers – the photosphere,
the chromosphere, and the
corona – and its surface
temperature is 5500 deg C
•The nuclear explosions on
the surface generate solar
winds, which are ejections
of extremely hot, charged
particles of plasma and can
travel through the solar
system at up to 450km per
second.
•Our orbital speed
around the sun is about
(107,000km/h.
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