Colours of the Sun (2)

 

Part Two: pretty pictures and a little nerdy stuff

For my own peace of mind I must begin this post as I began Part One with a warning that might seem blindingly (!) obvious to you but which I ought to spell out nevertheless: please never, ever look at the Sun without adequate (certified) protective filters. Even more crucially, make absolutely sure that your binoculars’/telescope’s field of view doesn’t even stray close to the Sun. The filters I used to generate the images shown below removed, at a minimum, 99.999% of the intensity of the sunlight.

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It’s a fascinating time to be imaging the Sun as we’re near the peak of solar activity in its eleven-year cycle. When I started imaging the Sun a few years ago several days could go by with little or no activity; as 2024 progressed it became a rare day when there weren’t several large and/or complex active regions. The Sun’s disc has a diameter of approximately 109 times that of the Earth so in the images below you’ll realise immediately just how extensive these active regions can be.

Shown above is the neutral/white-light imaging setup I use in order to gather images of the photosphere; I introduced it in Part One. With this I can capture the whole of the Sun’s disc within a 3k x 3k (i.e. 9 megapixel) colour image which gives a decent level of detail. Sunspot active regions and the associated faculæ are easily observed. This is not like taking a snapshot using ones phone or handheld camera unfortunately. The issue is one of atmospheric turbulence: the higher the magnification the more distortions a given exposure may suffer from (I uploaded to my YouTube channel a very short video taken through another of my telescopes in order to illustrate this phenomenon.) To get around this I’ll typically collect up to 2000 frames using the software cited in Part 1 then use a free software package called Autostakkert! in order to select the best – usually the least distorted ten or fifteen percent only – before stacking them to create a single optimised image. This will go into another free package called Registax for sharpening and perhaps basic colour balancing before sending it to an image processing package like AffinityPhoto or Photoshop for final ‘polishing’.

Now, as discussed in Part 1, ‘colour’ is a term that needs a bit of thought. When I use my colour astro-camera the frames that emerge have a green tint because the detector chip inside isn’t the standard RGB of a smartphone or other digital camera but it’s a pattern of RGGB (for reasons I’ll not go into here). Correcting for this is trivial, but in truth one could choose almost any colour for the final image simply by selectively altering the colour balance or colour saturation at the image processing stage. A ‘correct’ balance will yield a white photosphere, but if it’s desired then a yellow-coloured Sun is easily possible. I’ve done both, although I’m increasingly tending to the more neutral/natural white.

When it comes to the remotely accessed setup in Grenada, Spain I mentioned towards the close of Part 1  the whole point of the exercise is to observe at specific wavelengths, using in particular H-alpha light. One is therefore using precision narrow-band filters to select out that one colour associated with the emission from excited hydrogen. A colour astrocam is very inefficient for this – there will be nothing at all recorded in the green or blue channels of course – and it’s far better to use a monochrome camera and then add any desired colour digitally during processing. The rig is shown above; it’s a screenshot from the Zoom-enabled session (- details here; my excellent guide and teacher for the experience was Gary Palmer). The setup we used was the one on the left hand side: a Williams Optics 120 mm refractor, with a ZWO-ASI1600MM astrocam, all on an IOPTRON CEM120 mount.

After a couple of false starts due to the weather, my session took place on 4th July. In order to ‘ground’ the images I used my own backyard setup to capture the Sun’s whole disk in white light using my homemade solar filter. It’s shown below, with the active regions identified using the internationally accepted conventions which one can find online. I find the Space Weather website useful in this regard, and you can find images and associated information for any specified date in their archive (see here). Also useful is the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, which includes video sequences for particular dates (see here). I’ll share the rest of the story using the images I later generated from all the data that was gathered on the day. Each of these was generated from original data files containing 2000 exposures which were graded by quality and the best stacked and refined using the packages mentioned above.

My backyard image of the photosphere as it appeared on 4th July, collected and processed as described above.

A couple of composite images overlaid onto my white-light image of the photosphere are shown above. I have marked on my image the active region under observation; superimposed on the side are three narrow-band filter images of that same region. Notice the difference in appearance of the sunspots and the area around them depending on which element we’re utilising: hydrogen, sodium and magnesium. The faculæ (regions of higher temperature) show up well in H-alpha light, sunspots less so; the violence of the Sun’s magnetic field changes in an active region can be seen in the contorted surface patterns. Surface granulation shows up well in sodium light, and the sunspots seem increasingly more clearly revealed as one progresses through Na to Mg. Please note again that the colouration is added digitally – hence the variation: I have been learning how to process the narrow-band monochrome such as these for the first time and therefore trying out various methods. During this period, as an additional complication, I began to migrate from using Photoshop to AffinityPhoto. Unfortunately, there are relatively few online tutorials based on the use of AffinityPhoto although this one was useful; the short books by Dave Eagle were particularly helpful.

In the pair of H-alpha images shown above one can readily see prominences reaching out into space. The one on the left is associated with an active region not yet in view from the Earth – i.e. it is being generated around the rim. The Sun rotates once in approximately four weeks at the latitude of these prominences, so this one would have appeared within days. (The Sun is a ball of gas, hence the fluid-like variation of a solar ‘day’ depending on where one is looking between the poles and the equator; see here for more information.) Also apparent in these images are the ‘grass-like’ spicules in the near-surface region of the chromosphere. Each of the two images is itself a composite: one set of 2000 short-duration exposures for the surface and another set with longer exposure times for the spicules and prominences. These two sets were separately processed and then combined digitally to yield the final composite images. The original two layers of the final composite image shown above on the right are reproduced below after stacking the selected subset of 2000 exposures for each of them.

Although filaments – a prominence as seen from above – may also be discerned in the coloured images above, particularly the one on the left, I’ve inserted an image below in which I have accentuated them during processing.

Given the novelty of all this I confess that it took a long while to get to grips with the remotely collected data files I was sent by my guide Dave Palmer. However, in the process I’ve learnt a lot, enjoyed myself and am pleased with what I have to show for all the effort. I hope you like the result.

Colours of the Sun (1)

Part One: a bit of light science

For my own peace of mind I must begin this post with a warning that might seem blindingly (!) obvious to you but which I ought to spell out nevertheless: please never, ever look at the Sun without adequate (certified) protective filters. Even more crucially, make absolutely sure that your binoculars’/telescope’s field of view doesn’t even stray close to the Sun. The filters I used to generate the images shown below removed, at a minimum, 99.999% of the intensity of the sunlight.

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What colour is the Sun?

Red and orange, as it rises or sets? Yellow, when it’s low in the sky – and in pretty much every child’s painting? What about in the middle of the day when it’s too bright to stare at, and what does it look like to the astronauts on the International Space Station? Just what is the true colour of the Sun?

It depends …

What we perceive is an admixture of the light that the Sun emits (all the various colours, or wavelengths, it generates), the effect of whatever that light travels through and finally our ability to detect it. Our eyes – actually, our eye and brain in combination and assuming the absence of colour blindness – see reds, oranges and yellows when the Sun is nearer the horizon and its light is therefore passing through a lot of Earth’s atmosphere. The shorter wavelengths of light, towards the blue-violet end of the rainbow, have been preferentially spread out by process called Rayleigh Scattering. This describes the scattering, or spreading, of light by particles smaller than the wavelength of the light: the scattering increases as the wavelength of light shortens. Thus, the blue-violet end of the rainbow spectrum is scattered widely, giving us a blue-coloured sky, whilst the redder colours, with longer wavelengths, are scattered less and are therefore more likely to reach us from the Sun’s direction.

If we can reduce the intensity of the sunlight to safe levels when the Sun is high in the sky and thus passing through much less atmosphere, we’d see the Sun as a whitish disk. Our friendly local astronauts, free of our atmosphere altogether, would also tell us that it looks white. This is because the Sun is emitting light across an incredibly wide range of wavelengths. Although its emission is most intense at wavelengths corresponding to green light, the presence of wavelengths to either side add together to give us white (see here and the figure below for a little more information). Ben Harding, a long-time member of a local amateur astronomy society, SEKAS, and a source of considerable useful advice, pointed out to me an excellent way to demonstrate the Sun's colour when it's high in the sky and therefore not going through a lot of atmosphere. At the many public events SEKAS participates in he projects a suitably attenuated image of the Sun from a telescope onto card in order to show everyone that it is indeed white - see image below, on the left. This image is used with his kind permission. It turns out that we can also get a hint of this from our Earth-bound vantage point even without equipment. Light summer clouds appear as near-white in colour due to a process called Mie Scattering which describes the scatter of light from spheres of a size comparable to the wavelength (colour) of the light – microscopic droplets of water in a cloud fit the bill. In this case, there is no significant variation in the strength of the scattering process with the wavelength of light: thus, all colours are affected approximately equally and we therefore get an idea of the actual colour of the Sun, white.

Solar projection revealing the Sun's true midday colour. On the right is a graph showing the intensity of light emitted by the Sun across the visible wavelengths. It approximates to something called Black Body Radiation, with a peak intensity in the green part of the visible colours but significant intensity to either side and out towards ultra-violet and x-rays and towards the far infra-red; see here. Note the sharp spikes in intensity at specific wavelengths; these tell us about the chemical make-up of the Sun; we’ll return to them below.

This is my first ever image of the Sun. It was generated from a stack of frames collected by my entry-level astrocam (Altair Astro gpcam2 290c) and my first ‘proper’ telescope bought post-retirement (Skywatcher 150PL on an EQ3/2 mount with retro-fitted drive motors; see here for the full story) and a homemade solar filter (see here). My field of view was limited to 0.27º x 0.15º so I only captured a portion of the Sun’s disk which has an apparent diameter of about ½º. However, it’s enough to illustrate both the colour of the Sun in visible light and the granulation – the result of thousands and thousands of convection currents, like the swirl of cold milk poured slowly into hot coffee. In fact, the Sun’s surface is reminiscent of the shell of a chicken’s egg. There are lots more images in Part 2 of this post.

This is my current setup for imaging the whole disc of the Sun. The telescope is an AA Starwave 80edr fitted with a Baader 2x Barlow lens and an AA533c camera cooled to -10°C; the mount is a Skywatcher HEQ5, controlled from a laptop via ASCOM/EQMOD using Carte du Ciel and SharpCap (URLs for the software are in the appendix to an earlier post, here, together with installation notes).

Having made a start at describing the colours of the Sun according to our eyesight we now need to dig a little deeper. We tend to assume that we’re looking at the surface of the Sun, but it turns out that things are not entirely straightforward in that regard. Remember, the Sun is a huge ball of gas; it’s a pretty good sphere, which one might expect since both the gravitational force pulling it in and the pressure trying to push it out are both acting in all directions uniformly. However, what we think of as the surface of that sphere is in fact the deepest of the three principal outer layers of the Sun: the Photosphere  (It’s called that because it’s where we perceive most of the Sun’s light to come from: hence, ‘sphere of light’.) The photosphere is at about 4000-6000°C depending on altitude. This is what we see if we look at the Sun through a neutral, or white-light, safety filter. It’s also the layer in which we can see sunspots (patches with a slightly lower temperature which, as a result, appear dark) and faculæ (typically, nearby areas of slightly raised temperature which therefore look brighter).

Above the photosphere is the Chromosphere – literally, sphere of colour. Its temperature rises with altitude to over 8000°C and it glows with a red colour derived from the hydrogen plasma that makes it up. We don’t normally see the red because the chromosphere is of much lower density than the photosphere and the intensity of the light generated is therefore swamped by the denser photosphere. It is however possible to see it when the brighter photosphere is blocked out at the peak of a total solar eclipse. The chromosphere is the layer of the Sun’s atmosphere associated with giant prominences that may extend thousands of kilometres into space, and filaments (essentially, prominences seen from above) and spicules. The latter are relatively short spikes of red-glowing hydrogen that can give the Sun a sort of ‘grassy’ look. There’ll be several of my images in Part 2. Further out still we get to the Corona, but I’m not going to dwell on that in this post.

So far, we’ve established that the colour we see depends on the temperatures present in the Sun’s outer layers (Black Body Radiation),what the sunlight has travelled through (e.g. Earth’s atmosphere) and the workings of our eyes (or our cameras). We’ve also had a hint that the chemical make-up of the Sun has an influence (e.g. the red colour of the chromosphere being due to hydrogen). The additional important factor arises from the fact that, whilst the Sun is mostly composed of hydrogen (H) and some helium (He), there are many other elements present in small quantities. We can use them to look at the Sun using particular wavelengths/colours of light – these are the emission lines uniquely associated with each given chemical element. For example, if we put energy into a hydrogen atom – and there’s no shortage of energy in the Sun – it enters what’s called an excited state. The natural next step is for that atom to shed the excess energy, typically by emitting a packet of light (a photon); the beauty of that process is that every element has its own ‘fingerprint’ of emitted photon wavelengths or colours. Thus, a principal colour emitted by hydrogen is red; it’s often labelled as Hα, or H-alpha, and has a wavelength of 656 nm (nanometres, 10^-9 m). If we observe the Sun through a filter that transmits only this wavelength of light then we’ll see a red Sun. Moreover, by picking up that one particular wavelength alone we’re effectively looking specifically at how hydrogen, to the exclusion of all other chemical elements, is behaving within this solar environment.

We can track through the ‘rainbow colours’ by using filters that single out the wavelengths emitted by other elements present on the Sun. Sodium, Na, emits light primarily at 589 nm, which is yellow; magnesium, Mg, emits photons at 517 nm and that’s a green light; calcium, Ca, emits blue light at 393/396 nm. For each colour (or wavelength of light) we are focusing on a single element and thus on a slightly different aspect of the Sun’s behaviour; in effect, we can use these selected elements as an internal solar probe in order to complement observations in ‘white’ light (i.e. all the wavelengths together – our view of the photosphere). There is a caveat: the effect of Rayleigh scattering (see above) is to scatter the shorter wavelengths preferentially and getting good Earth-bound images using the blue light from Ca is therefore hampered. As a consequence I show no Ca-light images in this post.

It is in fact possible, with the right equipment either on Earth or on a satellite, to focus on the light emitted from excited atoms of each of the elements in the periodic table up to iron, Fe. (There is insufficient energy in the Sun to make anything heavier than iron – that requires the sorts of energies associated with a supernova explosion. Remember that the next time you look at gold jewellery; it exists because earlier generations of giant stars have died 😉). There is additional information here, here and here.

For we amateurs, however, the bright emission wavelengths of hydrogen, sodium, magnesium and calcium are accessible. The cost of the kit is, however, a very long way beyond my budget. This is particularly true for those wishing to collect images using the light from hydrogen-alpha emission: thousands of pounds. Hence my own ‘white light’ setup which depends only on reducing all the incoming wavelengths to leave only one part in 100,000; I can image only the photosphere: sunspots, faculæ and granulation. Although I’m mostly content with this state-of-affairs I did treat myself to a relatively inexpensive gift during the Summer: I paid for 90-minutes of guided access to a solar imaging setup in Spain. The details are here. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in this area. 

I’ll share some pretty pictures in Part 2 of this post, along with a bit of nerdy stuff on image processing. Until then, keep looking up (safely) …

The Last Moon

Every year for several years I’ve had an invitation spend the morning with two classes of Year 5 pupils at the Churchill School during their ‘Space’ curriculum topic. Not once has this been less than a delight; it’s always great fun (see here and here to get a flavour). This year’s trip took place in late June – timed such that their preferred target of the Moon was up in the daytime and was no more than about half in sun. The reason for not wanting either a crescent Moon or a full Moon is that we want a chance of seeing a selection of craters, lava basins and mountain ranges but we also want some decent shadows arising from a low Sun in the lunar sky. On that latter point, the ‘best’ shadows are those near the terminator – the line that divides night from day. There are several options for such planning, but the website I tend to use is here.

This is my small, i.e. reasonably transportable, telescope and mount: a Skywatcher 72ED on a Skywatcher EQ3/2 mount (- the image above wasn’t taken during this visit). I’ve retro-fitted motors to the mount in order to track the motion of objects across the sky as the Earth rotates; indeed, this is an enormous help when attempting a ‘mass observing event’ since the target – the Moon – isn’t continually drifting out of the eyepiece’s field of view.

Having learnt the hard way that the variation in height amongst ~60 ten year olds can make viewing tricky I’d purchased a right-angle for the eyepiece which could easily be rotated to suit all-comers. That worked well. Inserting an additional lens (a 2X Barlow for those who wish to know) which, in effect, doubles the magnification was less successful since it has the effect of ‘dulling’ the image. At night this isn’t a problem when viewing the Moon, but on a bright and relatively humid morning in mid-summer when the contrast is already reduced it had the effect of ‘washing out’ the details on the lunar surface. However, once committed to the setup there was no time available to reconfigure everything once observing began. One lives and learns.

This wasn’t taken on the day – it’s an image I prepared earlier ;-) However, it does show the sort of view I had hoped to show everyone – albeit somewhat degraded by the daytime conditions. For anyone wishing to identify features on the Moon when observing by eye, using binoculars or a telescope I’d recommend a phone app called ‘Lunar Map HD’ – although there’s a lot of other online resource also available.

Unfortunately, this is the sort of view we all got: the moon on a bright, humid day in the middle of summer - washed out.

Everyone saw the Moon through my telescope as far as I know, although it took some people less time than it did others to get their eye in just the right position to see it. (One person did come back for a second attempt right at the end, having failed to see much when it was their turn. I’m glad that they did; it would have been such a shame to have said nothing and as a result missed the experience.) After we’d finished there was an hour of Q&A back in the classroom. It’s rewarding to be able to show people a view of the Moon that they might not have had before, but it’s definitely huge fun to attempt to field an apparently never-ending stream of testing questions. Every year I’ve been invited to visit this school I’ve been blown away by the energy and insight behind the questions. Yes, there are some that might be written off as left-field or off-piste – but that would be to miss a key point: these are all young people who’re engaged with the wider subject matter, and many were genuinely well-informed. Enthusiasm is worth a lot.

Nothing trumps break time, and nor should it – particularly at that age – and the time rapidly arrived for me to take my rig apart again and return it to the boot of my car. I was helped by my two wonderful Year 5 host teachers, in the course of which they told me about their new teaching assignments for next year. Apparently neither of them will be teaching Year 5 – so my astronomy/space mornings have in all probability come to an end. That visit may well prove to be the last observing session I assist with at the school; no more shared Moon ...

Over my head

[I confess: this is a hybrid post in which I have broken the golden rule of 'knowing my audience'. As a result, you may well choose to read only part of it. The opening few paragraphs speak of my experience in the planning and presentation of a talk on astrophotography to a non-expert audience. After a couple of tiny footnotes you'll get to two appendices. The first of these was written in response to requests to provide a synopsis of the above talk; it includes a lot of links to various packages etc. So far, so good. The second appendix was added as a note of my parallel struggles trying to get a replacement laptop to run all my astrophotography needs in the way my rapidly-fading older one did; it's distinctly nerdy and is also replete with links.]