The h-alpha filter works by using an etalon to restrict the wavelengths of light as viewed through the telescope down to only a small region of the spectrum around 656.3nm (typically with a bandwidth of <0.7Å), which is a principal emission wavelength of excited hydrogen atoms (for the transition n=3 to n=2 in the Balmer series). This allows features such as prominences, flares, filaments and active regions to be observed, whereas in white light these are often not as noticable or are invisible.

My images were taken using either a Toucam Pro II webcam (for the closeups), or using the SBIG ST2000XM coupled with a Denkmeier Part O/Cell #150 relay lens combination to give the system enough backfocus to bring the camera to focus on the Takahashi FC60NZ. Note, for those of you with an SBIG camera taking very short images (milliseconds), you’ll want to check out SBIG’s Article on Vertical Streaking (.pdf)- you need to adjust a potentiometer in the back of the camera to avoid this happening!

The following gallery is a collection of images taken using the Coronado filter – there are more images of the sun in h-alpha during the 2005 Annular Eclipse.

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In late March, 2006 I travelled to Turkey to watch the total solar eclipse. After flying to Antalya, we drove to Kalkan (220 km west) where we stayed for a week around the eclipse. We observed 1m57s of totality from the villa in excellent conditions.

I used a Takahashi FC-60 and a Nikon D70S with 1.8x teleconverter (thanks Bob!) to take the images, with processing in Photoshop. The high contrast shot appeared in the first page of the gallery on Spaceweather on the day of the eclipse, and was used on the front cover of the April Newsletter of the Astronomical Association of Queensland!

Here are some of the best images from the eclipse (if you view the gallery, make sure the post has the full width of the page to see it all – clicking the expand button or viewing the individual post):

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In 2005, we travelled to Dénia in Spain to watch the annular eclipse that took place on the 3rd Oct. After flying to Alicante, we drove to Dénia to our villa which was located in the line of annularity.

Using a Takahashi FC-60, a Coronado SolarMax 60 and BF15 and an SBIG ST-2000XM, I imaged the solar eclipse from the balcony on the villa.

Luckily, the cloud which had been around all morning cleared just in time to view 2nd contact and annularity, even though we were a few miles away at the time as we had travelled to try and find clear skies. We saw the eclipse from halfway up the “Elephant” (El Montgó – the mountain above Dénia) whilst the ccd camera and mount did their work taking images automatically.

Here’s a gallery of the best images from the eclipse: (if you view the slideshow, you’ll need to expand the post to full width to see it, or view the post as an individual post rather than in the multi-column layout)

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