jimao22

Three days later, I filmed another eruption on same active region, AR 13078. This one wasn't so powerful (only class C4.5). The film with this one is down bellow, with a graph showing what this class mean in terms of power. The Y axis is logarithmic, so don't be fooled by the small differences.

I found that the eruption showed above was a M5 class eruption, with CME (coronal mass ejection). The fact the active region it was almost on the solar meridian, make possible interaction with Earth magnetosphere.

2 days ago I made some images to Sun, trough a Baader Ha filter. It was a batch of 99 images, a little bit of 1 minute between them (started at 9:30 and finish at 11:36). I made a film from the images and the result is in the link down bellow.

Just to understand the issue: The mount is an old ZEISS mount, a huge one, made in 1956. The 3 scopes on it have perhaps more than 70 kg, even more. The exposures are short enough to not be influenced by the poor tracking, but we need to take bunch of them, with some delay between, 60...120 sec. So when you look at the series of shots, you can easily see how Sun is moving. We can align them, but the FOV is very narrow, almost same size as the full disk of the Sun, so sometime the Sun go outside the FOV. Exposures are taken with MaximDL on one computer and KStar on other. That's why I need a mean to keep all under control.

Hi there! I have a question for who can help on this. I make some solar observations full disk, but the mount is not very accurate (perhaps in the near future we'll change this). But mean while, we are using what we have. Is it possible to make guiding on Sun similar with what we are doing for stars? Or is any other possibility to do that? What crossed my mind it was to use a low F guider with a focal reducer (to try make the Sun as small as possible), with appropriate filters in the front of the guider and use PHD whith some settings that can allow some guidance. I just ask, I did not tried anything until now. Thanks in advance! Cristian

Hi, This is Iris nebula (NGC 7023 from Cepheus) trough my set-u for astrophotography: MN190 (mak-newt) on EQ6 belt-drive, ASI ZWO 533MC as main camera and QHY5II-L mono as guiding camera (OAG). The result is a stack of 41 exposures, 5 min each, from a Bortle 5 zone. Is amazing how CMOS camera and especially this one can work on a light polluted sky in full broadband. Acquisition, calibration with dark, flat and bias, debayering and stack - MaximDL, background neutralization, Photometric Color Calibration, ABE, SCNR, MMT, Histogram Transformation - in Pixinsight, Contrast, star reduction with 2 pixels and a bit of extra-denoise - in StarTools.

After a while doing my best to have a very "perfect" set-up, highly automated, I find that doing pictures in the old way fashion is not bad at all. Moreover, you can take you light set-up with you and find dark locations or find places where transient phenomena occur (like ISS transit over Sun or Moon, sun eclipses or so) so to have such a set-up is not a bad idea at all. Having this in my mind, I prepared a set-up for this purpose. It is composed mainly from a iOptron Skyguider Pro and an Omegon 66/400 apo refractor. This set-up is in continuous improvement and seems to be a great idea. Anyway, first shots look great and this is one of them. Is about M42 (Orion nebula), 32 x 60 sec + 50 x 10 sec + 100 x 1 sec, processed in HDR using MaximDL for stack and calibration and PixInsight for HDR processing. No filters at all, only light frames - camera used is ATIK 460EX at -20 deg.

Hi, This is the second target with my new color camera from ZWO. I have another shot to this target, from few years ago, but that one was a mono image, so I went back to it to see how it look like in colors. The rig used is my set-up from observatory - EQ6 belt-drive, MN190, OAG, automation with SELETEK and so on. The result is a stack of 32 x 300 sec images.

Hi! This is my first image made with my new ASI ZWO 533MC camera. The target was M81 and the picture is a result of 50 shots x 300 sec, -20 deg. C, with my MN190 Maksutov-Newtonian astrograph on EQ6 belt-drive, from my backyard observatory. The sky is Bortle 5 on my location. The workflow for processing was the following: calibration with dark, bias and flats in MaximDL, debayering in Maxim again, alignment and stack in Maxim one more time and the rest of operations - MaximDL and StarTools.

Hi. On 15-th of December I made some exposures to this lovely comet, very visible and very fast on the sky. So I took exposures 60 sec long with a pause between shots of 120 sec. The film is on the link, down bellow.

These days I was at some star-party into the mountains and I finally made the tests with the ATIK 460EX. The field is the bigger I can obtain with what I have and due to this fact, I made some exposures to Amdromeda and Pleiades. Andromeda is 27x60s+30*x20s+30x5s. M45 is 47x60s. All procesed in PI without calibration, no filters at all and a Moon at 35%.

Finally I had some decent weather and I made some exposures with my new rig: the home-made mount, the Omegon 66/400 and the ASI 174 camera. All images have the roundness less than 0.1 (measured in MaximDL) and I found that is no need for long exposures to have very good results. The final result is a balance between the shortest exposure you can do it with a good enough SNR (1) and the longest exposure you can afford with a good roundness (2). (1) depends on the local light polution, the contrast between the deep-sky object and the sky background (2) depends on the mount accuracy On my site I found that I need exposures between 30 and 60 sec for the best results with this set-up. Next tests - with the ATIK 460EX CCD camera. Much bigger... M92 - 9 x 40sec M101 - 20 x 60sec M51 102 x 40 sec M51 - detail

Due to the very bad weather this spring time, it was very hard to find a good night for testing properly the new mount. But somehow I find a proper night being with one of my astro buddies in my observatory. I made a lot of exposures with Sharpcap but the darks and flats made with MaximDL didn't work to calibrate these images. I suppose is some kind of incompatibility in acquiring the data. Even if I tried to make new darks and flats few day later using the same Sharpcap, I didn't obtain better results. The best results I obtained when acquisitions were made with MaximDL - lights / darks / flats and biases. But I had only 5 exposures like this, 90 sec each (lights). The result is great in my opinion, roundness of the stars is 0.084 and I am sure I can increase the exposure time somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes without problems - unguided subs with same great figures. The most important thing to obtain these results is the proper polar alignment. I think a PoleMaster it will be the best improvement ever for this nice mount I have.

You cannot see it because is on the back side of the mount, where the motor is. Is not rocket science, is just a screw that make a lever to push the motor axis on the sector. Is not big deal.

The friction drive can be adjusted with a screw. You cannot preload by pushing the shaft other than using some kind of lever operated by a screw. So is adjustable.