VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Adrian|DATE|1361708456|CONTENT|Hi Peter

I&#039;m a long time lurker :-)  I started taking pictures of the Sun with a refractor, digital SLR and solar film last year.  You can extract a lot of detail from your initial picture by doing a little bit processing in Photoshop or GIMP.  Just make some adjustments to the image histogram.  I wrote a blog entry showing my method here:

[url=http://cosmicriver.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/processing-my-solar-images/]http://cosmicriver.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/processing-my-solar-images/[/url]

Recently I&#039;ve been getting much better results by using deconvolution filters (via the G&#039;MIC plugin for GIMP) rather than unsharp masking - you can really pull more detail out of your images.  And now I prefer leaving the images as B&amp;W rather than adding the fake orange colour.

Also, my telescope is on very robust equatorial mount - the mirror flip inside the camera can&#039;t be contributing to the blurring that I also see in my images.  It&#039;s very difficult to focus the camera accurately on the Sun.  If your camera has a live view then you might be able to zoom in on a sunspot and get better focus.  My Nikon doesn&#039;t so focussing is always a bit imprecise (although deconvolution can later remove small amounts of blurring effectively).

Best regards,

Adrian|EMAIL|adrian@themoon.co.uk|IP-ADDRESS|86.129.101.190|MODERATIONFLAG|