Live-Streaming the Sun: Configuring an H-Alpha Telescope at Morehead Planetarium (2023)

Undergraduate: Jack Lawrence

Faculty Advisor: Dan Reichart
Department: Physics and Astronomy

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Morehead Planetarium and Science Center offers education and research opportunities to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as members of the public. The addition of an H-Alpha Telescope to live-stream the Sun will propagate this purpose in the form of a new exhibit. This project began this endeavor by fixing a Coronado SolarMax II 90 RichView Solar Telescope with 2, 6563 Angstrom blocking filters to a Morehead viewing deck. The telescope captures thousands of frames of the Sun via a CCD camera each minute and relays the information to a computer inside the building. The images are stacked and enhanced with AutoStakkert!3, waveSharp 0.2, and Adobe Photoshop to produce a high-resolution image of the Sun with arcsecond precision. A 45”x28”x24” housing unit was also constructed out of 1sq” aluminum extrusions and 6mm corrugated plastic to provide protection from wind and rain. The housing has a removable top-shield controlled by a RaspberryPi, which also focuses the etalons on the telescope via a custom control GUI. Though the housing has been constructed there are still concerns about temperature and moisture control inside the box. Image processing steps are not fully automated and may require the use of new software to streamline the process. This project is ongoing.

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