SS Group (20-07-2016)

Date of image 20/07/2016

Equipment: SW Skymax 150 (f12) at prime focus with a home-made Baader solar film filter. The telescope was mounted on an EQ5 pro. Camera: Canon 550D in 640x480 movie crop mode set at 1/640s exposure ISO400, the frame rate was 60fps. 

I wanted to capture the same sunspots I shot yesterday to see how they progress in time. There is a clear change in structure especially in the dole spot which is elongating north-south. The weather was Ok but interrupting clouds did ruin some frames. 

The total movie duration was about 5 minutes. The best 25% of frames were selected and decompressed by Pipp, Stacking and editing was done with RegiStax 6. I used about 20 alignment points. I think about 300 frames made it into the final stack. 

I did not ramp up the wavelets because I was getting ringing effects at the suns horizon. I also did not like the smoothen effect of the de-ringing feature in Registax. 

The telescope was tracking well.  Focusing was done by trial and error (by slowly tweaking the focus and watching 15 seconds of live view). I don't think the focus was as good as yesterdays shot. I am now thinking of attaching a scale onto the focus knob to fix the exact position of good focus.