[Dennis]

On Friday 10th May 2024, I managed to play hide-and-seek with the intermittent cloud cover and record this giant sunspot, AR3664 which has been classified as a 'Carrington-class' sunspot.

The Carrington Event was a large solar storm that took place at the beginning of September 1859, just a few months before the solar maximum of 1860.

I used the Canon EOS R7, RF 200-800mm and RF Extender x1.4 mounted on the Tak EM 200 Temma II to grab 75 frames which I then Aligned/Stacked in Autostakkert!4, deconvolved in Wavesharp and then finished in PS CC.

1120mm, 1/1,000 sec, F16, ISO400.

Here are a couple of examples showing the effects of the poor seeing due to the jet stream. One of the better frames and one of the more seeing-affected frames.

They are single, full-res crops (Raw SOC) taken at the same settings but 17 seconds apart.

I also fitted the RF x2 Extender to give 1600mm, but the seeing was so poor that all the images were very soft and lacking detail.

Dennis.