From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: August 15, 2010 10:41:30 AM MDT

To: macastronomer@yahoogroups.com, Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: a split personality

Hi all,

I used this week's hot, humid and sometimes sunny weather to experiment with my 10" mak/cass and the photogenic little sunspot region 11903:

http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/split_personality.html

(you can seen the full size pictures by clicking on the image panes)

This spot had an earth-sized umbral core... not particularly newsworthy - but it did perform a nice split over several days and made an interesting subject if you brought the magnification up high enough. The seeing was never very good - but the gentle morphing and bloating frame to frame allowed reasonably accurate stacking. And although the granulation was only hinted at in a handful of frames, doing multiple alignments with the bright bits of faculae allowed the convection cells to rise to the surface with a little unsharp mask.

be cool,

Alan