Steve Ward

2 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

very nicely captured

Thanks Pete ... 

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 ...  

21 minutes ago, Stu said:

@Steve Ward is on the thread, so here are the correctly oriented versions 😉

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 ... 😆

Just now, John said:

Not only "whoops a big scope" but also "whoops a big scope case" with that one if I recall correctly 😁

 

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 ... 😆

Just now, DirkSteele said:

Whoops indeed!  I have often found myself in possession of a new scope, and wondered "how did that happen*?"

 

*Then I look at my bank balance, and it all comes flooding back! 😉

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 ... 

54 minutes ago, Kon said:

Happy to take a look if you want

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 ... 😉

2 minutes ago, Kon said:

I have not done it yet (Saturday might be my first ever transit) but I think you need to take your frames and blend them together in any editing software. I am planning to use this link to get me going:

https://www.photographingspace.com/how-i-got-an-apod-dylan-odonnell-part-2/

I think step 19 is relevant to you.

@PeterStudz and @Pete Presland have both recently done it so they might be able to give you some tips how to do it.

 

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

7 minutes ago, Kon said:

Nice capture! Try extract the frames as you can overlay them along its travel path.

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 ... 😉

2 hours ago, Dedanann said:

DARV Method, thank you for that, I will investigate and take my time to see if I can get something better with this until I get autoguiding later on, maybe the big fat fella in the red suit might be nice to me this year, we'll see

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 .

2 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

Finally manage to capture the ISS transit the Sun. There never seems to be many from my back garden, so i had to find a suitable place on the somewhere.

luckily there was a layby a few miles away that was perfect.

 

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 ...