The Sun in H-alpha during the Venus Transit Day at ESAC

The Venus Transit Day was held at ESAC on the 09 May 2012. One of the activities scheduled for the day was an automated Sun observation from around 10am till 18pm, as a demonstration of the observations to be performed of the actual Venus Transit, on 6 June 2012. Real time images of the Sun were displayed with a video beam projector in the ESAC cafeteria during lunch. The images were posted in a dedicated webpage that will be used for the Venus Transit (http://www.sciops.esa.int/index.php?project=VENUSEXPRESS&page=venus_transit).

A video was created with the images of the day.

The Sun in H-alpha on the 09 May 2012 (one image captured every 30sec).

Part of this video, and other interviews of the Venus Transit Day will be aired in Euronews (http://www.euronews.com/) starting from 24 May.

The equipment was a Messier R102 Optical tube with a Baader solar filter, and a Coronado SolarMaxII 90 BF30, in piggyback, mounted on top of a Meade LXD75/EXOS-2 Goto mount. Images were acquired with a Nikon D3100 and a Canon EOS 500, transfered to ESAC servers for automated processing and storage through dedicated pipelines, and delivered via WebDB to outside viewers.

Telescope mount set-up

The most spectacular images were captured in the H-alpha channel. Here an example of those, a vulture transit, captured in flight around the Aulencia Castle.

Vulture transit in H-alpha

The Sun with Nikon D3100

The image shows the Sun in H-alpha through Leo's Solarmax 70 telescope, as seen on Friday 17th February. Miguel's Nikon D3100 camera was used for image capture. This is our first attempt to image the Sun with such camera. Antonio Talavera lent the Nikon adapter ring.

Date Shot: 17/02/2012 15:23:43.40
Image Quality: Jpeg Fine (8-bit)
Shutter Speed: 1/25s
ISO Sensitivity: ISO 100

Image was processed with PSP8. Different processing was performed for the limb and disk, and combined via disk masking.