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# May 3, 2026 Sun
- URL: https://macobservatory.com/may-3-2026-sun/
- Published: 2026-05-10T20:07:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-10T20:07:59.000Z
- Description: The first time I ran a full solar capture and processing workflow inside my own apps: 11,159 H-alpha frames through a Lunt LS60MT, captured in Laminar and stacked, sharpened, and colored in Strata.
- Author: Andrew Burwell
- Tags: Imaging

This was the first time I ran a full solar capture and processing workflow inside my own apps. Light came down through the Lunt LS60MT, into a Player One Apollo-M Mini, into Laminar for the SER recording, and out into Strata for stacking, sharpening, and coloring. 11,159 frames at one millisecond apiece in narrowband H-alpha.

Strata's solar path finally got tested against real photons. The WOW Solar sharpening engine, the disc-mask geometry shared between Sharpen and Color, the gradient-map colorization presets, all of it was built on synthetic data and the math behind the algorithms, because I did not own a solar scope when I wrote it. Today I owned one for about an hour before pointing it at the Sun. The pipeline held. The disc-mask snapped to the limb. The prominences came through clean. There is more tuning ahead, especially on the Color phase, but **the bones are right.**

If you shoot solar in H-alpha or Ca-K and would be willing to share an SER from a recent session, I am still collecting test data at [support@macobservatory.com](mailto:support@macobservatory.com). The more real-world variety the engine sees, the better it gets.

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Capture Details

Acquisition  
11,159 × 1.00 ms 

Equipment  
Telescope — [Lunt LS60MT](https://agenaastro.com/lunt-solar-60mm-f-7-universal-day-night-use-modular-telescope-observer-package.html?rfsn=7382607.4cfa63&ref=macobservatory.com)  
Camera — Player One Apollo-M MINI  
Mount — [Rainbow Astro RST-135E](https://www.deepspaceproducts.com/product/rainbow-astro-rst-135e-weightless-mount?ref=macobservatory.com) 

Software  
Mac Observatory [Laminar](https://macobservatory.com/laminar-planetary-capture-software/) — Capture  
Mac Observatory [Strata](https://macobservatory.com/strata-planetary-processing/) — Stacking, Sharpening, Color 

Location  
Sugar Land, TX 

View the full-resolution image and technical details on [AstroBin](https://app.astrobin.com/i/v9dlw3?r=B&ref=macobservatory.com).