Quote Originally Posted by Redrobes View Post
If you were being true to real life then the star would look barely at all like any of these. If you look at our sun through a solar filter then what is almost shocking is the uniformity of it. It also has a really crisp edge to it, so much so that amateur astronomers use full eclipses to get the occlusion necessary to photograph the solar flares. These pro astro pictures are using sensors that can determine the sub structure of the suns to give the swirling patterns.

Here is a photo I took of the partial solar eclipse of this year.
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2635

Hmmm your right about the edge being more "sharp" than I expected. However, other than the yellow-orange instead of red-orange, I think mine is at least at fairly good representation.

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/sun_cam.html
http://space.about.com/cs/solarsystem/p/suninfo.htm
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html


The funny thing is that I made a circular halo, but the many of the pictures I have seen, the halo effect is more squished, more of a ellipse than a circle.