Turn mono Sun shots into fiery colour

A simple, free technique to take your solar images from greyscale to gold

- Ivava Peranic

As the latest solar cycle reached its peak, many amateur imagers took their first solar snaps, capturing fascinating and dynamic activity on the Sun's surface.

One popular method is to use a solar hydrogen alpha filter such as an etalon that, if coupled with a monochrome camera, unveils the Sun's chromosphere and delicate details such as prominences and flares. Once you've teased out these features through processing, you can easily convert your monochrome images into the familiar red-orange hues of our nearest star. Here we'll walk you through the two key techniques - inverting and then colourising - you can use to achieve this.

We'll use ImPPG and GIMP, two capable image-manipulation programs you can download for free. ImPPG handles the inversion process, but note that it works only on PCs and with monochrome image files from monochrome cameras. GIMP is an image-editing program not unlike Photoshop. You can use this to convert your image from monochrome to colour. Inverting a solar image simply means assigning the white areas to black, and the black areas to white, much like a negative, while keeping the background black. While it's certainly a matter of taste, this technique boosts prominences and flares on the limb in a single capture, and helps surface details to pop.