Re: Unusual Digital Photo of the sun

Mark Dunn wrote:

It is just cloud.

I suspect it is cloud, possibly combined with the effect of cooking and overloading the CCD in the vicinity of the sun. If it was used in LCD preview mode the part with the solar disk on must have been pretty close to suffering permanent damage.

Green channel saturates first hence magenta artefacts around it. Odd that the sun goes black. It would have been interesting to see some shorter exposures made for the sky rather than the foreground.

You can't see prominences except during a total eclipse,
and not even then without a fancy filter.


Wrong on both counts.

Baader catalogue of 1999 famously had a front cover image taken by a Japanese expert of a large eruptive solar prominence at high altitude sunrise on slide film with a polarising? filter to improve contrast. A cliff edge had been lined up to get the disk masked off and the prominence isolated. It is a stunning sequence of images. It is *dangerous* to do and you have no chance at all if the photosphere is visible.

During a total solar eclipse no special equipment is needed to see solar prominences. At all other times you need a specialised filter or high dispersion spectroscope and a certain amount of bravery/foolhardiness.

"Mike Williams" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:i8arwHAKibXDFw5z@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Wasn't it aaa who wrote:

Earlier this year I was on holiday with my family in the UK.
My son took the photos at the links below.
They are completely unretouched or manipulated in any way.
We are intrigued by the formations round the sun.
You can see from the rest of the pic that the sun is probably shining


though

light cloud.
Are the fuzzy prominence-like features really just earth cloud? Or has my
son's cheap digital camera really captured something solar?


My guess is that it's the shadow of smoke coming off the imaging chip
where the heat from the focussed Sun has started to burn it.

You may be closer to the truth than you think. I suspect there could be permanent damage to the filter array where the sun's image was sat.

Simplest test is to photograph uniform grey card in diffuse light and apply histogram equalisation.

I don't think that there are any real atmospheric phenomena that look
like that, and it's certainly not anything solar.

The wispy patterns are clearly image artefacts. But I have never seen anything quite like them. My own camera will happily photograph the sun as a bright disk in a sunlit scene without saturating into oblivion.

You do get very strange effects when the sensor is overloaded and the demosaicing software makes invalid assumptions...

Regards,
Martin Brown
.

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