HR resolution setup : 190mm diameter Maksutov Newton Telescope and Nikon Z8
HIGH RESOLUTION HDR IMAGE OF THE SOLAR CORONA
My resolution setup was the same as for 2024 Eclipse, a Maksutov-Newton 190mm diameter telescope, with custom field corrector and fast Nikon Z8. With the fast camera, i have been able to acquire about 600 frames during the totality, including about 300 bracketed images to make this HDR composite revealing the details of the corona.
I was located in Alarcia, a bit in the mountains (1200m asl), to have some shade for the family and young kids. Like mostly everyone, the weather was excellent, but the sky transparency was rather poor.
As my setup was the same as in 2024, I have measured the transmission of the atmosphere with different means (stars in the field of view, chromosphere and corona) and i estimate the atmosphere reduced the amount of light collected by about a factor of 10 to 12 compared to what it would have been in a clear sky with the sun high above the horizon.
But despite the rather poor transparency of the sky and the relatively short duration of totality, the high-resolution HDR image shows an incredible amount of subtle, low-contrast structure in the solar corona. I’m honestly very pleasantly surprised! to create this image, i acquired 33 sets of bracketted exposure, each set comprising 9 images with exposure from 1/250 to 1/s, at 64iso. Getting so many frames with the Z8 made it possible to compensate, at least in part, for the poor transparency.
click here for the webp version, which is just as good quality as the youtube compression.
