Rob63

A huge thank you to FLO & IKO for this, it's such a treat to work with such fantastic data. Perfect timing too as I have been thinking of pulling the trigger on the StellaMira 90mm triplet so this was a fantastic insight into just how good this scope is ! I wanted this image to show the magnificent background nebulosity while still looking natural and not over-saturated. Pixinsight load Ha, OIII, SII and do a slight Crop and DBE to each Ha, OIII, SII => stacked as Master Lum Deconvolution with BlurXTerminator (pre V2 🙂 ) Slight noise reduction on OIII & SII channels via MultiscaleMedianTransform (MMT) Basic Histogram Transformation & Masked stretch Channels combined with PixelMath Red: Sii*0.35+Ha*0.65 Green: Ha*0.35+Oiii*0.65 Blue: Oiii StarXTerminator to remove stars and process separately. Multiple rounds of Histogram Transformation SCNR LRGB combined with masterLum Stars RGB mapped as SII Ha OIII Photometric colour calibration for background neutralisation (narrowband mode) Several gentle applications of Histogram Transformation as I want to de-emphasise the stars a bit. Curves (saturation) Export to photoshop Adjust colour, saturation & contrast to taste. Add stars layer (linear dodge(add) ) Add any final tweaks

I was lucky enough to capture a fantastic display of cloud iridescence (aka Rainbow clouds) from South Edinburgh a little after sunset yesterday.

Only saw this was happening less than an hour beforehand so it was just a record shot but great fun to do. The capture glitched halfway through (old laptop) and missed 600ms i.e. half the transit, so this is just a ISS single frame (on top of 30 stacked frames for the surface). Gear used: 80mm scope, Lunt B1200 and ASI290 on manual mount, very undersampled but wanted to make sure I caught it. Exposure 0.55ms, gain 100 around 110fps ISS Transit from Edinburgh 2023-10-15 12:28 passing AR3464 and AR3465

I am really behind on processing my data but thought I'd share this nice solar filament from 8th September 2023 ~12:57 UT. Image inverted to show a better view of the structure involved and rotated 180º for viewing. Equipment used was 120ED, Quark, ASI174MM AR13423 from the same session 12:45 UT

Lovely FD's Dave

A good session on Monday allowed me to do some testing with various sizes of aperture masks in CaK and G-Band. Finished the session with some H-alpha and the standout for me was the southern polar region, not quite a crown but nice filament & filiprom. I don't usually like inverted images but it really does bring a 3D feel to things Image rotated 180º for viewing. ED120, Quark and ASI174MM

Hi Ian, The most popular sensor for solar is still the IMX174 mono and it works well for Quarks. I used the ZWO ASI174MM version for these images but there are several companies making cameras with this sensor. Gain with this was around 220 and exposure time 7.5ms at ~130fps.

I'd like to claim that it was careful planning and research but I have to admit that it falls into the category of "Very lucky imaging"

Enjoying a quick visual session yesterday morning with the 80MM & Quark on my manual mount (Scopetech Mount Zero) before the rain was forecast to arrive. I decide to capture some reference shots and I was lucky enough to catch an M.6 Class flare as it happened 🙂 Very exciting to watch and and happened very quickly, I could see the changes in real time on my laptop screen. Here are a few images in the sequence 08:53 08:55 08:57 GOES info for this flare

Thanks Dave, 3 weeks of sunny days in Edinburgh and more to come, a pretty rare occurrence in these parts.

Loving this Prominence! Captured 60 x 2000 frames from 8:30 - 9:15 UT this morning (14th June) 29.8Mb in size hosted on Flickr looped forward-Backwards. A couple of stutters as I was running out of disc space but it shows some fantastic motion. ED120mm Quark, ASI174MM on a Skywatcher EQ6-RPro. Bonus content 🙂 The same Prom in Calcium K

Still about this morning, much bigger now and changing shape

Good to know Peter, it was the first chance I had today to "catch some Sun", it's a fascinating little guy.

Beautiful little liftoff prominence in the SE just now 13th June 2023 ~4:17pm (UT). I was enjoying a nice visual session when I spotted it, I don't think I would have by camera alone I really had to up the gain to get it on screen. ED80, Quark, ASI174MM on a Scopetech Mount Zero, captured via manual mount drift technique Quick process below in mono & 'RGB' Mono RGB

Lovely image Damian, I will have to give CrossOver a try.

Some decent weather here in Edinburgh last week and I had a few early morning session before work. All taken with the 120mm scope on EQ6-R Pro mount, I haven't 'corrected' rotation, just left the in best orientation for viewing Ha images all with Quark, ASI174MM and Baader 35nm Ha filter as an ERF AR3302 AR3302 Mosaic Solar Smile CaK 65mm @ f14 using ASI290MM

Managed a short Ha viewing session this morning before 9am and there was a lot of action going on. Decided to get a few captures by just letting the image drift across the frame as I was using the Scopetech Mount Zero (manual). ED80 with a Quark Chromo and ASI174MM.

Lovely stuff particularly the filaprom.

Thank you, I'm vey honoured and will drink from my mug with pride. Well done to everyone who entered, there are a lot of fantastic images in this thread.

Not easy to diagnose without an image of what you are seeing Dave but there are two potential issues that spring to mind. 1. The heater on the etalon has failed or gone out of range - This would give you a featureless disk Does the red part get warm when its at green status? have you tried various dial settings? 2. The blocking filter has gone out of band (due to age, heat etc.) Is the view washed out, lacking contrast but you still get some faint Ha features? Check out the following thread https://solarchatforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=25951 case 1. is not really user fixable, are you within warranty (5 years for a quark I think)? case 2. is fixable - I just replaced the blocking filter in mine which was 7 years old and it has made a big difference (12.5mm Andover 656fs02 1nm).

The Photoshop plugin is now available (it's still a beta version) and apparently also works in Affinity Photo.

AR2993 and 2994 in Ha. 23rd April 2022 around 2pm ED120, Daystar Quark, Baader 35nm as ERF, ASI174MM Autostakkert-> IMPPG ->Photoshop

😀 Nice one David, that perfectly sums up my feelings about the Win11 UI

Yesterday (25th) was my first decent length of session with the Lunt B1200 CaK module with the sun at a reasonable altitude. Seeing was not great with a lot of high haze but there wasn't much in the way of wind or clouds. I was able to test with various masks 100mm, 75mm and 50mm to figure out what the best option was for my Skywatcher ED120 DS pro (900mm f7.5). Camera was the ASI290MM (usb3 at around 120fps) The best by far from my session was 75mm giving f12, this is still a little bit undersampled but looks pretty good to my eyes. AR2976 FD Bonus image 😀 WL of AR2976

Tasco 40mm circa 1973 - came with a table top tripod Good on the Moon but not much else.