LukeTheNuke

Some silly solar noob thought the AR had already said tatty bye yesterday! (cough) 

What an AR! What a week! Even the dude who was selling the Lunt 100 has had second thoughts after the past week!

Ah, I thought it would be gone by today! Thanks for the final view. 

Very nice, well done battling the conditions! I felt a bit sorry for those other spots today, they are interesting too and worth some attention. But it's hard not to look at the monster!

I didn't pop out as much as I was hoping today (some boring jobs to do), it did strike me that the proms had changed quite a bit by the time of my last view.

A lot of stargazers would love to know how to fade the moon in and out.

Yeah. I think white light is arguably better value, especially when spots like those turn up! How do you get on with your Solar Scout? Are you happy with it?

Very nice! A day for the 174?

Tatty bye to that lovely AR. I can't complain about the views of it this week.

I took in a few views today. Thin cloud here for a lot of the day again, though we had some decent seeing before 12. My wife Sarah dug out her DSLR last night in case the aurora showed up again (I have no idea where mine is!), and the thought of borrowing it for five minutes today did cross my mind!

Wow, those are fantastic, Roy. Well done! Gosh, my wife was going on about maybe getting an Edge 11 last week I think it was (though I think she's since cooled on the idea - though I could go on about how ace it'd be for star parties as a fairly compact scope).

Theses image certainly don't put me off that idea! Thanks for the fab views!

Lovely pics, and your enthusiasm is lovely too! 😎

Wow! What a stunning collection! Congrats!

Oh, you're hanging out with the posh folk at solar chat? Please drop in from time to time for tea here. I think they probably take biscotti rather than jaffa cakes.

It could always be worse. My chips took a hit at the seaside once. My back too, but I was more concerned about the delicious chips. It could always be worse. A friend's coffee with Baileys took a hit one time by the coast. I'm not sure it gets much worse than that. But it probably does. Gosh, could you imagine not noticing the coffee with Bailey's had been hit?

PS please give your lucky scope a loving stroke, for another aurora show tonight.

PS2 I didn't finish the chips, honest.

Well done, just seen a video of the solar flare party on Gong. If the sun can arrange the really big one for 2 pm, that would be fab.

21 minutes ago, PeterW said:

…. Knew I shouldn’t have quit to bed at 12:30… should know by now with this hobby… keep going till the sun comes up!

Was the early morning ones as good as the 2330 ones?

Peter

And for some of us, keep going when the sun comes up!!! 😁 Those spots look fab, and the big prom has made a break for it this morning. I was robbed of a view of the prom thanks to thin cloud, but I caught the remnants ten minutes ago visual only (pic below is from Gong), which are still quite considerable. Not with my camera, alas (five o'clock position, going, going, ...):

20 minutes ago, PeterStudz said:

Wow… what a night. Or was it morning? I ended up staying up all night… M13, the ring nebula and for the first time this year the dumbbell, ISS transit, the brightest shooting star I’ve seen in a long while - I think it might have been the same as @LukeTheNukesaw, travelled approximately east to west. Just a lot of time simply looking up added by a couple of small glasses of brandy. I’d run out of whisky  And that damn “light pollution”. Pictures taken as I was packing up at about 3:50am. The images of The Plough taken about 30 seconds apart on my phone. 
 

Lovely pics! I regret that I didn't check again later in the night. I thought I checked the aurora alert site and it looked over and done earlier in the night (well, morning), but my bad. D'oh, I was awake for a while, as well!

The shooting star I saw was travelling west to east, starting very much in the east, and burning out towards the eastern horizon. My wife and son also caught the end of it, which was ace. I think I caught most of it. It was amazing, multiple burning fragments, a real, sparkling firework! How funny that it happened the same night. Or maybe I just don't look up enough  😀

Damn, when this hobby is good, gosh. It takes your breath away. I've been enjoying the sunspots again this morning. Thin cloud here, which is a shame, as I couldn't see the big prom making a break for it. Still, a bonus to see that amazing active region again. Thanks everyone for posting your pretty pictures, they all look amazing! I've just got blooming sensor noise. #shouldhaveboughtanexpensiveappleorsimilarandnotacheapytabletandmycheapphonedoesntevenhaveacameralol

Can a UV/IR cut filter be used as an internal ERF (instead of an external D-ERF) for the Baader Sundancer II h-alpha solar filter with a 120 mm scope?

I don't want to go the (expensive) external D-ERF route, as I like using a h-alpha filter in different refractors (60, 85, 100 and 120 mm, and who knows what else in the future). They say up to 80 mm no ERF is required, same as the Quark, as far as I recall. And I believe both are mica-spaced etalons.

I know you can use a UV/IR cut with the Quark in a 120 mm (hence why I ask for the Sundancer), but I'd like to avoid going Quark again, due to multiple issues I've had with them, unfortunately, as lovely as a good Quark is. The latest being that my wife's Quark hasn't aged well.

One plus for me of the (much more expensive) Baader Sundancer, I understand, is that it uses a Solar Spectrum filter (which has a good reputation as far as I know), and should hopefully be non-ageing, though you still need to avoid it freezing ("The dielectric coating of the block filter (instead of the usual silver coating) and airtight storage of the SolarSpectrum Etalon filter in oil prevent the ageing processes of simpler filter designs. With proper treatment, the SunDancer II will retain its performance for many years.").

Thanks for any help with this.

Luke

Saw strong shafts of light here in Bedfordshire, and hints of colour. Unfortunately all my pants tablet has recorded is sensor noise! And I saw the best meteor I've ever seen! Towards the east. What a night! And the sun wasn't too bad this morning either.

It's much better than my attempt yesterday with an action camera and then a tablet!

Nice one! I'd better finish up my gin in case we're all doomed. Would be a shame for it to go to waste.

3 hours ago, Kon said:

Thanks. For planetary imaging I use the drift method but for this particular capture I tried to move the dob or at least keep the sunspot in the middle of the sensor as I couldn't otherwise stabilise it in as!4.  For this image I had an 8,000 frame capture  and stacked the best 5%. The passing clouds were not playing ball to get more captures.

Wow, that's fantastic. Manual tracking! Well done! I used to use drift just for low power on the sun with a 60 mm refractor. It's great to see someone using a dob and manually tracking! It makes me wonder about using a manual dob for lunar imaging.

Lots of detail! A manual dob? Are you moving the scope at all during capture or letting the sun drift over the chip? How many frames are you getting to stack?

On 09/05/2024 at 13:57, paul mc c said:

Equinox 120ed..

Congrats! I don't expect to ever part with my Equinox 120. Great scope! And it's saved me a lot of money because it's already quite big and tells me that perhaps my frequent wish to get a 150 mm doesn't need to come true! The scope looks in good nick, I quite like that case too. Enjoy!

3 hours ago, Nik271 said:

The proms are better seen when the bandwidth of the etalon is a bit wider, about 1 angstrom instead its nominal value of 0.6 at the recommended focal ratio of F7 and  above. The solar disk will be a bit washed out as a result. 

And the proms are better seen not through cloud! 😀 I recall now that thin cloud can zap proms. I'd just forgotten. The prom looked plenty bright to me at F7 and F9 yesterday. I'm used to trying to see spiral structure in faint galaxies, so proms aren't much of a challenge for me usually!

I remember reading up the technical details on the Quark and fussing over optimal focal ratio. But having used scopes from F6 to F9 (F6, F7, F7.5, F9) hundreds of times, swapping over white light and h-alpha sometimes (obviously with the scopes capped and pointing away from the sun!) I found them in practice all perfectly usable, for proms and solar disc. My favourite scope for visual with the Quark is the F9 100 mm, even though the F7.5 120 mm has more aperture as well. My wife agrees.

3 minutes ago, Nik271 said:

@LukeTheNuke: The big prom is actually quite faint, I noticed that any cloud which dims the view even a little bit makes it disappear. So probably your Quark is ok.

I suggest you try a faster scope to see proms beeter, something in the F5 or F6 focal ratio. My small 70mm ED refractor is F6 and I find it gives a good balance between proms and chromosphere features with the Quark. If I want to see the chomosphere better I can just stop it down to F8.

Thanks for the tip. I do usually normally use an F9 with the Quark for visual (the lovely SW ED-90 DS Pro - I love that thing! Light, sharp). It was just the thin cloud, I am 99.9% sure. The thing is that my wife's Quark degraded over time and is now much worse on proms than it was before. So I wondered if the same had happened to mine. Thankfully, not. Phew! My Quark is far from perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing.

Thin cloud here again, and against my better judgement and despite having a backlog of stuff to do, I had to have a peek. I blame all of you, LOL! I think it's only more recently that I've realised that sites like this can be so helpful for keeping you engaged in the hobby. So a little thank you, while I'm on the subject. It makes a difference, and I think hobbies and interests can be something that puts an important spring in our step.

Anyway, my renewed appreciation for the gear Sarah and I have accumulated over the years continued today, and I was thinking how ace the Vixen Hal 130 tripod is plus a dual mount bar.

Oh yeah, that monster active region is so impressive! I loved the trail of smaller spots, artistically spaced out - there was so much detail in white light. H-alpha was very interesting too on the monster, a bit of flaring. I did get some pretty decent, steady views, despite the thin cloud. So it was well worth the (fairly minimal anyway) effort.

Oh, and I was pleased to see yesterday and today that my old Quark is okay on proms. The proms looked really faint the other day, and it has been a while since I used my Quark, but it was just the thin cloud robbing me of brightness on the proms that evening, it seems. I am due a windfall soon hopefully, and it's tempting to think about a Lunt (I'm trying not too look too closely at the 100 mm for sale, I hope someone snaps it up before I get my cash, LOL!) Part of me, though, enjoys using my different fracs for solar. Despite my problems with the Quark, there is a terrible temptation to buy a new one. I'll have a ponder and perhaps check with FLO if they check them first or would be okay about me returning it if I'm not happy with it. There is still the risk though of if it goes faulty and having to return it, being unsure what the quality will be like of what I get back. Or I suppose Solar Spectrum, though the price is much steeper.

Please buy this one before my windfall comes in! What would tempt you the most to splash the cash? One of those fancy Solarscope filters?

Thanks for the info and tip! Full frame sounds good. Oooh, you have a posh cooled 174 as well. I feel I can't get another 174, alas, as it would feel an own goal, having sold mine!

So you're using the Evostar 150? Have you had that a while? Is it a bit of a handful, or not too bad? I've thought about a 150 a few times, but our 120 feels fairly big already.