Constructing a filter for solar imaging with a DSLR

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In recent months I’ve had an increasing interest in astronomy and astrophotography, to my surprise discovering the Baker Street Irregular Astronomers who hold monthly observing sessions in Regent’s Park – I never imagined it was practical todo astronomy in London’s light polluted sky. I’ve not got as far as purchasing a telescope yet, instead deciding to learn a bit more about the topic first, and experiment to see what I can do with just a DSLR camera. With a Nikkor 180mm prime lens and 2x teleconvertor I was able to produce this image of the Moon

The Moon

The 180mm lens + 2x teleconvertor on the D90’s 1.5 crop factor sensor gives an full frame equivalent of 540mm. This is really the bare minimum acceptable reach for getting images of the moon, with the image above being a pretty aggressive crop down. There are enough pixels for publishing online, but not really sufficient for printing out at any reasonable resolution.

As most people know, by a stroke of good fortune, the Sun and the Moon have the same apparent size when viewed from the Earth (this is how the moon can precisely block out the Sun during an eclipse). Naturally, since I was able to get a nice image of the Moon with the setup described above, I could expect to get a similar sized image of the Sun. Of course looking at, or pointing your camera at, the Sun is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. You absolutely must take care to protect both the camera optics and your eyes if you are going to try solar imaging. There are a variety of solar filters available in the astronomy market with varying characteristics, but for basic full spectrum DSLR imaging, what you want is a filter built with a piece of Baader AstroSolar Safety Film. This is available in A4 sheets from any decent astronomy store, in my case The Widescreen Center, near Baker St.

Baader AstroSolar Safety Film

The pack just contains one fine sheet of film, around which you need to built a mount to hold it in place in front of the lens. This involves a bit of fun with cardboard, scissors, sellotape and a craft knife. The mount will consist of two flat pieces of card with discs cut out to sandwich the film between, and a tube that will fit snugly around the lens barrel. The basic cut out shapes used to construct the mount can be seen in the image below:

The cut-out parts

For the front sandwich I decided to use 4mm poster board to get rigidity. The centre cut outs are just a few mm smaller than the lens diameter ensuring the lens front will not be pressing on the relatively delicate solar film. I decided to cut a 3rd piece to act as a front flap cover to protect the film when not in use too. For the tube, I decided to use thin cardboard – something little thicker / stiffer than than commonly used for cereal packets. The first two strips of it are 2 inches wide, while the third has an extra 3/4 of an inch, which is then cut into a series of little flaps. These flaps will be used to attach the collar to the front sandwich.

The first step was forming the tube / collar around the lens. I placed double sided sticky tape along the two strips of cardboard without the flaps. I fastened the first strip snugly around the lens:

Forming the collar

The next two strips of card simply wrap around the first, reinforcing its shape. Finally the outer layer is wrapped in a strip of black duck tape to secure it fully.

With construction of the tube out of the way, we can move onto construction of the front sandwich. The key thing to remember at this step is that we do not want to place the safety film under tension – it is actually desirable if it is a slightly loose / slack and this will not affect the image quality at all. The Baader instructions recommend laying the film on a sheet of tissue paper to protect it from any roughness on your work surface.

The Safety Film

The film is actually highly reflective & silvery – the yellowish colour seen above is caused by the reflection of light from the walls in my house. The two plasterboard pieces need to have one side each, covered in double sided sticky tape. Gently place one piece face down onto the safety film, lightly pressing around the edges to get good contact. Then flip the board over so the safety film is facing up again and place the second piece of board to complete the sandwich. Now bind the whole lot together by wrapping more tape around all the edges, taking care not to touch the area of film visible through the cut out disc. The 3rd piece of poster board for the protective cover can now also be attached with a few more pieces of tape.

The last stage is to attach the lens collar to the front board, with yet more double sided sticky tape. For added strength, I finished it off by adding strips of duck tape along the join between the collar and front boards. If all went the plan, then the result should look something like this

Finished filter

With the camera attached to a tripod, and the filter in place on the front of the lens, the complete setup looks like:

Filter attached to the camera

The weather was looking kind of dicey while I was constructing the filter, with pretty heavy cloud. By the time I had taken a break to eat lunch though, the cloud had cleared enough that the Sun was visible for a few minutes at a time. This allowed an opportunity to try out the newly constructed filter. Before using the filter though, it is essential to verify that the safety film was not damaged during construction. The instructions that come with the film describe the kind of defects to look out for, basically tears, scratches, holes, etc. The check for damage should be repeated again every time you go to use the filter. You cannot be too paranoid when imaging the Sun. For additional safety it is advisable to not directly look through the camera view finder, even when the filter is in place. Instead either use the live view from the LCD screen on the camera, or better yet, tether the camera to a laptop using a USB cable. I chose the latter approach, controlling the camera from a laptop using Entangle.

Actually attempting to take a photo though highlights another challenge – that of lining up the camera so that it points at the Sun, without actually looking at the Sun. To get the initial rough alignment, I adjusted the tripod head so that the camera lens was parallel to one of the tripod legs, then shifted the entire tripod around until the shadow cast by that tripod leg disappeared. With rough alignment achieved, I then enabled “live view” in Entangle and made minor changes to the tripod head until the Sun appeared in the centre of the screen.

Aside from the safety benefit, one of the key reasons to tether the camera to a laptop is that it makes focusing much simpler. The laptop screen can zoom the preview image until it shows pixels at 1-1 size. Very small tweaks of the lens focusing ring can then bring focus into the sweat spot. The result of all this work, was the following image

The Sun

Click on the image above to be taken across to flickr where it can be viewed full size. The white colour is the result of the of the Baader film doing its job. If a traditional “yellow” image is desired, it is a simple matter of adding colourization when post-processing the image. The handful of dark smudges in the bottom left quarter of the image are sunspots.

Overall the construction of the filter took somewhere between 1+1/2 and 2 hours (I wasn’t timing it so don’t know the exact time). When viewed with normal full spectrum light, the Sun does not produce anywhere near as interesting an image as the Moon. It was none-the-less satisfying to be able to capture the sunspots. The limiting factor to producing a better image at this point is likely the need to get a longer focal length lens. As mentioned earlier the setup used for this image, was equivalent to about 540mm. If I can switch the Nikkor 180mm lens out for something like the Sigma 150-500mm lens, it would be able to get to 1500mm full frame equivalence. Of course, first I’ll have to buy the Sigma, and then go through the process of building another filter to fit that lens, since its diameter is no doubt different to that of the Nikkor 180mm. Those who really get addicted to solar imaging will end up buying dedicated scopes with Hydrogen-Alpha or Calcium K-Line filters, which produce some really stunning images.

A DuoTone process using GIMP

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All the photographic management & processing tasks I do use open source applications, in particular Digikam and GIMP. For processing, I’ll often convert to monochrome and then add subtle toning to the image. If I’m lazy I’ll do a quick monotone using the “Colors -> Colourize” menu option, but for things that I care more about I’ll go to the trouble of applying a duotone. There are a number of different ways to achieve the same end result, and for this blog posting I’ll illustrate a technique using layers in GIMP. The screenshots here are taken on Fedora 18, with GIMP 2.8.4

Initial colour image

The image we’re starting with is a simple shot of the Roman Baths in Bath which I’ve scaled down to approx 900×600 pixels, which is the standard resolution I used for things which will be uploaded to the web only.

There is of course only one layer to start off with, which has been given the name “Background”.

Step 1: Conversion to B&W

Before applying any tone, the colour needs to be removed from the image. There are a huge variety of techniques for doing this, which could satisfy many blog postings in their own right. In this case I’ve made use of the relatively unknown “c2g” operation (Tools -> GEGL Option -> c2g). This produces a fairly contrasty and grainy monochrome image

Step 2: Copy layers

Now it starts to get interesting. Create two copies of the “Background” layer, giving them the convenient names “Highlights” and “Shadows”

Step 3: Add layer masks

Right click on the thumbnail in each of the new layers and select “Add layer Mask”. In the dialog that pops up, select “Grayscale copy of layer”. Then select the thumbnail of the mask in the “Shadows” layer and invoke the “Colours -> Invert” menu option. The layers view should now look like this

Step 4: Fill layer canvas

Set the foreground and background tool colours to those that will be used for the toning. With this image, I am using #90551d for the brown tone and #184e83 for the blue tone. Now select the image thumbnail of the “Highlights” layer and fill with the foreground colour (blue) by pressing “Ctrl+,” (or using the bucket fill tool). Repeat for the “Shadows” layer but fill it with the background colour (brown) by pressing “Ctrl+.”. The layers view should now look like this:

This should have had quite a dramatic effect on the actual image

Step 5: Set layer mode

After the previous step, we’re just seeing the addtion of two colour masks, which isn’t the desired effect. The colours need to applied selectively to the highlights and shadows respectively. To achieve this goal, the blending mode of the “Highlights” and “Shadows” layers needs to be changed from “Normal” to “Color”. The layers view will now look like this:

Looking at the actual image, we’re heading in the right kind of direction, but the toning is still quite strong

Step 6: Set layer opacity

The final task is to moderate the toning effect, which is achieved by changing the opacity of the “Highlights” and “Shadows” layers. For this image, the “Highlights” opacity is set to 16%, while the “Shadows” are slightly higher at 24% opacity.

Final image

This duotone processing is now complete. The final image has a fairy subtle toning. If a stronger tone is desired, the opacity settings in the previous step can be tweaked as desired. Personally for duotones, I prefer to keep the effect quite light, leaving stronger effects for monotoning.

Building a light stick

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Following my attendance at a London Photographic light painting workshop, I decided that I wanted to build myself a light stick, suitable for producing light trails and more. This is basically an approx 1m long strip of wood, with leds running down the side. You can’t buy them off the shelf, but the constituent parts are all readily available from eBay.

The Parts

At its heart, the light stick is just a strip of 5050 spec SMD (surface mount device) RGB LEDs, with a density of 30 LEDs per metre. These strips actually have 3 LEDs at each location, one red, one green, one blue.

Don’t be tempted by the alternate 3528 spec SMD strips, since these produce a much dimmer light. The LED strips are produced to a variety of weather proof standards, with the IP65 rating being the most suitable for building light sticks, since it encases just the top of the LED strip in what appears to be a translucent silicone sealant. The RGB LED strips usually come with a IR remote control device, with either 24 or 44 keys, which allow for choice of constant light colours, or various transition effects between colours. I purchased a 5m long reel from eBay which had a 24 key IR remote. The strips can be safely cut every 10cm, so if you can source additional IR receiver units, one reel can be used to build multiple light sticks

The 5050 LED strips require a 12volt power source, usually from a small mains AD/DC adapter. This isn’t much use for light painting which is going to take place outside, far away from any mains source. The solution is to just use a set of 8x AA batteries wired in series to get to the 12v mark. Again I turned to eBay to purchase a simple 8 battery holder. The battery pack has a PP3 connector, so another trip to eBay obtained a PP3 terminated cable.

For the stick itself, I made a trip to a local DIY store to pick up a length of wood measuring approx 2cm by 4cm, and some cable clips.

The Assembly

With the parts obtained, it was onto assembly of the light stick. The first step is deciding how long a stick to make. The LEDs come in a minimum of 5m lengths, which have explicit markings for where they can be safely cut every 3 LEDs (approx 10 cms). I decided to make a 90cm long light stick, giving 27 LEDs in total. I first cut the LEDs to the right length, used them to measure the exact same length for the stick, and then cut it to size.

The LEDs come with an adhesive backing tape, so they can be stuck directly to the narrow side of the wooden stick with minimum of fuss. With that done, the next step was to attach the IR receiver unit to the wider side of the stick and fasten the cables with a few cable clips.

The only remotely difficult step is connecting the battery cable to the IR receiver power cable. To do this I stripped the insulation off a 1 cm length of each cable, then simply soldered the two cables together. I used a short piece of heat-shrink to cover the solder joint and then wrapped the whole cable in layers of red insulation tape to make it a nice & robust.

The only unsatisfactory part of the exercise, was attaching the battery pack to the stick. With the shape of the battery pack I had purchased, there was no effective way to permanently connect it to the stick without making it impossible to later remove the batteries for recharging. In the end I went for the high tech approach of using 2 elastic bands.

The image above shows the finished product. For reasons of weight distribution, the battery pack is located 1/2 way along the stick, directly in its center, though you can’t see that in the above picture since I cropped out the boring 1/2 of the stick. The white box is the control unit for the LEDs, the power supply cable pluging in on the left hand side of the unit. On the right hand side, the top cable with the black terminated end is the IR receiver sensor, while the other cable takes power to the LED strip itself. The coloured buttons on the remote control, self-evidently, map to the desired colour of the LEDs. The other buttons control brightness, on/off and 4 different colour fading patterns.

The Demo

Only completing the device on Sunday evening, I have not yet had an opportunity to go outside and try it in the real world. I did however, do a very quick test inside to see how well it handled. Based on this test I decided that using a remote control isn’t the most convenient thing. It would be better to have a simple on/off switch directly on the light stick. By simple I mean, I attached the remote control to the stick using another elastic band, pointing at the IR sensor :-)

f/138 – Daniel Berrangé

Photography.Art.Astronomy.Science