Image

Solar corona up to 5 solar radii

This image was created from images taken with small Russian Maksutov-Cassegrain mounted on the Canon EOS 1D Mark II digital camera. It seems to be a crazy idea to connect a professional high-end digital camera body to a very cheep lens (for the price of the camera body you may buy about 50 of these lenses), but this connection makes sense. The optics itself is of very good quality with very low reflections but the decisive advantage is the weight and the length. The 500 mm F8 Maksutov-Cassegrain is only 13 cm (6 inches) long and it is significantly lighter than the camera body. It makes possible to use the camera body for fastening to the paralactic mount. Such configuration is highly resistant to vibrations caused by the shutter and enables to obtain razor-sharp images even with small, not very massive paralactic mount. The advantage of this configuration was even greater because of the strong wind on eclipse site during the totality.
 
Several stars are clearly visible in the image. Detailed identification of these stars led to the conclusion that the stars up to visual 9.4 magnitude are recorded on long exposure images and are visible in resulting composite image.
 
The field of view of 500m lens mounted on Canon EOS 1D Mark II (equivalent to 650 mm for classical 24×36mm film camera) is very near to SOHO LASCO C2 coronograph. You may compare original SOHO image taken at 10:46 UT and this SOHO image with eclipse image overlay.
Click on the image or on the following reference to display the higher resolution image version (2.3 MB, PNG format).

ImageTse2006tc_h500_in30_32.png
Date29. 03. 2006
Time2nd contact 11:02:23 UT, 3rd contact 11:05:29 UT
Total eclipse duration 186 s
PlaceNear Göreme, Cappadocia, Turkey
CoordinateE 34° 52.147', N 38° 39.390', alt. 1330 m
ConditionsGood, thin cirrus clouds out of the solar disk, strong wind, altitude of the Sun above the horizon 50°
OpticsMaksutov-Cassegrain MC 3M-5CA, 8/500 mm
CameraCanon EOS 1D Mark II digital camera (ISO 100)
Exposure1/1000 s - 8 s
ProcessingComposition of 63 images. Eclipse images were aligned by means of phase correlation, composed using of LDIC 4.0 software, processed using Corona 4.0 in order to visualize coronal structures. Final processing was done using ACC 6.0 software.
Image processing by Miloslav Druckmüller and Hana Druckmüllerová
SoftwarePhaseCorr 4.0, LDIC 4.0, Corona 4.0, Sofo ACC 6.0
OrientationImage must be rotated 28.73° anti-clockwise to achieve standard orientation i. e. North up.
Copyright© 2006 Hana Druckmüllerová, Miloslav Druckmüller
 


Miloslav Druckmüller
Institute of Mathematics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
druckmuller@fme.vutbr.cz
Page last update: 27.11.2019