David Smith

Sunshine in Scotland! Must be global warming

Nice shot Roger. Lots of clouds and some rain here today.

Nice John. I can never decide between mono and colour images, I like the false colour but sometimes think I can see more detail in the mono images

Finally, some half decent seeing! After yesterday and Thursdays dismal showing today the seeing was actually not too bad. I still struggled a bit in Ca-K but then the shorter wavelength suffers more than longer wavelengths. Managed to get something in all three lights today, FD & proms in Ca-K, white-light close ups and proms and close-ups (what else with a Quark) in H alpha. 75GB of data all in all, hence it's taken me a while to get it all processed in and around doing other things. Start off with the Ca-K and the usual 6 pane full disk mosaic Close Up of the bright plage region. I tried to to mosaic this region but one pane came out really soft Ca-K Proms Then some white light close ups. I failed to shoot a flat for white light so the granulation shot is not the best Finally the H Alpha. Managed to mosaic the region around AR12768 My first mosaic with the Quark, albeit just 2 panes but you have to start somewhere! Next up AR 12767 And the proms, 2 different processing methods for the same image below - which do you prefer? A couple of smaller proms also on show. I shot these in Ca-K too but haven't managed to do anything with the data yet. Maybe these give away which process I prefer? Have to say based on experience to date I am loving the Quark, visually it is as good as it is for imaging. I see very little in the way of Newtons Rings with my AS178 and flats are optional as the etalon seems pretty flat across the frame. My only niggling issue is not with the Quark at all, I do love full disk images and a Quark really isn't the best tool for that job......

Awesome John!

Nicely done. Horrible seeing here too, followed by clouds.

A brief cloud-free window early this morning, unfortunately the seeing was almost as bad as it was on Thursday! Attempted some Ca-K again but the seeing really was not up to it. I did come away with these semi-decent close-ups and some white lights though . Clouds came in before I got to H alpha

IMages from Thursday but ran out of time to process with work "and stuff". Seeing was horrible and I binned all the Ca-K data as it was ruined by the seeing. Managed to salvage these taken with the Evostar 120 (stopped down to 100mm), Combo Quark Chromosphere and ES 2x barlow. Fingers crossed for some clear bits over the weekend.

Just had a first look with the Quark this morning, that prom is awesome. Hopefully get some imaging done today but clouds have intervened at the moment

I love your optimism Charl

Nicely done Charl. Good to see you back posting images again.

Might seem an odd question, I'll explain. My southern horizon is full of trees obscuring the big planets from view from anywhere in my garden. I'm not keen to cart my kit off to some field to do planetary observing / imaging but really miss the big planets. So I thought maybe could just observe from an open bedroom window? We have a south facing bedroom window and Jupiter and Saturn clear the tree line around 10pm now. The only mount I have at the moment is my CG-4 which is not very practical to cart upstairs and setup but I do have a Manfrotto 190XPRO4 which I use for photography and could deploy as an alternative given a suitable head. For visual I could put the Skymax 127 on an AZ5 but would like to try my hand at some imaging which would really necessitate a driven mount. So my plan would be to pick up an AZ GTi, mount it on the Manfrotto, add the Skymax 127 and away we go. The bit I'm unsure of is if I can get a basic alignment from the bedroom window. As I understand it you can do a one star align with this mount but I cannot find a list of available stars to choose from? Any assistance gratefully received. Thanks David

Nice work Roger. My few minutes visual today were spent with the Quark.

Yep, me too.

Good shot. I managed to see it visually with the Quark about lunch time but then had to pack up quick when the rain started again!

Good captures. Interesting comparing the two, the PST BF appears to show some flaring around the spot whereas the Lunt shows "more detail" in the surrounding areas.

Very much enjoying your Ca-K animations. Must have a go myself!

Sorry Paul, only just seen your reply. Hope your Quark adventure is going well!

The Holy Trinity Nicely done

Great set Steve

Mixture of imaging and visual today. My first opportunity to image with the Quark attached to the Evostar but I also spent a lot of the session just experimenting with the config; barlows, aperture masks, quark settings, flats, etc. All the images below were taken with the aperture stopped down to 100mm and a 1.5x barlow in place. This seemed to give reasonable balance between contrast and focal length. Looks like I need to order a tilt adaptor to deal with the Newtons Rings, not unexpected. Ca-K is much simpler..... Nothing going on in WL today so rather than grab a full disk I just went for some granulation.

Nice image John. If it's any consolation it's not just you she is hiding from!

Early session today. After a few weeks break from Ca-K and WL whilst playing with the new Quark, I decided to get back to these today. Unfortunately by the time I got to H Alpha the seeing had gone off quite badly and I didn't manage to image anything. Nothing doing in white light but some detail on show in Ca-K including some nice proms.

Dumb question of the day but how does stacking 2 filters with the same band pass result in a narrower overall band pass