Steve Ward

When I fully opened up my Evostar 150 box yesterday ( having undone the lid in OVL's carpark to let the clouds out in Woolpit rather than here at home ) I found a glossy product flyer within that had this 'scope amongst the products. I can only assume that they had real intentions of making it to have it included in so many boxes , not sure of the date of the flyer and haven't checked the date of my OTA.

Quick grab before the clouds arrived , poor seeing but hey ...

I was tempted to mention it ... I just rattled off a few handheld frames for the hell of it , I'm a sucker for her against a pale blue sky . Didn't realise it was "X" time , I'll have to have a quick stack and see if the 150-600 picked it up ....

Picked a poor day for it with atrocious seeing and 32°C to swelter in , but I got a few images amongst all the faffing about , a few wrinkles to iron out but it's showing great potential. Even a hint of granulation amongst the noise in the closer view ?

Well I've fitted the focus motor , made a new Baader filter holder and I think I might have tweaked my 2" Barlow down from 1.4x to 1.2x ... There's a little too much wasted space on the sensor at the moment for my liking , no point jumping to 150mm aperture if I can't use every pixel ... 😆 Just waiting for the clouds to pass over and I can give it a test on the Moon and see how the disc sits before hot-melt glueing it in place , all things being well it'll have its first solar outing in the morning ...

Another slightly blotchy offering today , had to keep whittling down the pile of half decent frames until Mr Fussy AS!3 would stack them ... 😆

Luckily I've got an estate car , I'd have looked pretty silly if I had a Mini as the box was five and a half feet long ... ! It'll be on the mount full time so no case needed , just glad it hasn't got to go on top of my 14 foot high pier of old ... 😆

Was just about to pull the trigger on the Bresser 127/1200 yesterday when I noticed that the Evostar 150 was reduced by £100 in a couple of places ... As I'm only 25 minutes from Optical Vision's warehouse here in Suffolk I made a quick phonecall to my 'local' supplier TWC and an hour later it was home ... 😏

Whoops ...

Just managed to grab a few through the very thick grey blanket before it disappeared from view completely , very flat offering but there's only so much you can do ... 😆

A bit of a wait for the clouds to disperse , but well worth waiting ... And the SDO/HMI Continuum for comparison.

Thanks Pete , have fun ...

Thanks for the offer , the frames from the video aren't really good enough to warrant too much messing with to be honest. I have another opportunity on Friday morning by which time I should have a Class 3 card installed so can catch in 4k , and it's a 1.3 second transit so more frames. But if you want a play for practice then ping me your e-mail and I'll send the data over via WeTransfer ... 😉

Thanks Kon , Once it gets to the point of faffing about with layers and masks then I bow out gracefully ... I might send someone the frames if they want to have a play ... @Pete Presland

Hiya , I've got the 25 frames saved to do just that but I have no idea how to do it ... Any tips would be gratefully received ...

Been meaning to test the video side of the EOS 90D for a while and this was a great opportunity. Shot in FHD only as I need to get a faster SD card for the 4K recording , got another opportunity next week so I'll try again then Canon EOS 90D + Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary + Baader ND 5.0 Film. Slowed it down to 0.25x and made a looped gif in PIPP. And thanks to @Kon here are the single frames all stacked as it was beyond my feeble mind to figure out how to do it ... 😆

The seeing was superb this morning so I let loose the 32.5Mp of the EOS 90D as it was to hand preparing for an ISS Transit ... I haven't even touched the lovely 550D data yet ... 😉

Here you go ... https://www.cloudynights.com/articles/cat/articles/darv-drift-alignment-by-robert-vice-r2760

A bit of a long wait through the downpours and grey skies today , but eventually a patch of steady blue drifted my way after lunch ... A stack of 45 very nice frames. And SDO/HMI Continuum .

Nicely caught Pete ... I have a similar opportunity tomorrow morning and again on Friday , I'm thinking of tackling it with the EOS 90D and Sigma 150-600 off a tripod for laziness sake. I assume that the time data from "ISS Transit Finder" is in UTC/GMT ? I can see nothing anywhere to suggest anything different.

Early bird catching a bit before the cloud rolls in , pretty steady up there after a bit of overnight rain ... 😉

Nearly didn't bother with all the cloud about , but tried anyway and caught a lovely gap or two , and possibly caught a flare ? Grabbed some videos of the possible flaring , YouTube link here ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TGN1yiv9e8

As it's very rare to catch a sequence of 15 consecutive "keeper/stacker" frames I thought I'd better enter today's disc as I'm not sure whe I'll collect the same again ... 😏 16th June 2023 , 10:35 BST. CanonEOS 550D + Tal 100RS + 1.8x Barlow + Baader ND3.8 Imaging film + Oiii filter . 1/1000s @ ISO 100. 15 frames selected and stacked using PIPP , AS!3 , Reg 5 , Gimp.

Shot my usual 600 frames in 4 sets of 150. When checking through the wobbly mess in Set 3 I came across a remarkable sequence of 15 consecutive crisp , detailed frames ... So I used them ...

A few fleeting moments of clarity amongst a boiling morning , only a few but enough ... Wasn't good enough to get close in , bit I had to try ... !