As one of the long-standing members of the Astronomical Society of Las Cruces, I've been entrusted with one of the club's two hydrogen alpha solar telescopes. I take the scope to outreach events pretty regularly, and have done a little imaging with it but only via eyepiece projection using my iPhone. I wanted to try for a deeper image, so I attached my Atik 460 to the scope (a Coronado SolarMax 40 Single Stack), and took a few shots.

The 460 is a pretty hefty camera for that little scope, and a small amount of flexure was evident. That created some learning opportunities as features would come into and out of focus depending on what portion of the imaging plane was being used as well as where the etalon fiter was set. After some tinkering, I captured a set of several images in which the sunspots were especially well pronounced and focused. Another set was saved in which the filaments, plages and supergranules were highlighted. Finally a set of longer exposures were acquired to capture the prominences.

Stacks were generated from each of the three image sets then the three stacks were combined in Photoshop.

The field of view used to acquire the image containing the prominent sunspot is shown in the Imaging Details box. The images at top are cropped and reduced in size. Clicking the image with the prominent sunspot above will open up a full-size version.

Imaging Details
Imaging Date	21Sept2024 ~19:30 UT
Imaging Location	My home, Las Cruces, NM (32.31, -106.74, 1250m)
Constellation	Virgo
Imaging Optics	Coronado SolarMax 40 Single-Stack Ha Telescope
Imaging Camera	Atik 460 (10°C)
Imaging Filter(s)	n/a (built in)
Exposures	various
Guiding	n/a
Image Processing	See description, above. Images were aligned, and stacked using Nebulosity (2.4). Photoshop CS5 was used to combine the three stacked images and to add color and contrast to the images. Topaz DeNoise AI was used to reduce noise and sharpen the images.