Rob63

Mixed Sunshine/clouds on Friday 31st, seeing mediocre 1.5"-2"
ED120mm, Quark, ASI174MM on AM5

Two magnificent AR's for the price of one

AR3691

in RGB

AR3697 (AR3664)

in RGB

Managed a quick capture when I got home from work on Monday.

Sun very low and awful seeing but you can see the AR formally known as AR3664 (now AR3697) approaching the limb and is still putting on an awesome display.

The next week or so should be very interesting (if the rain ever stops here).
Lunt 60mm, ASI290MM, 2x Barlow all on a manual mount. Inverted image to emphasise the proms.

14 hours ago, skybadger said:

Thanks. So you think the two versions will be combined ? 

It's a possibility but would depend on the developers.

phd2.planetary is a fork of the main phd2 codebase, this means that it has all the same features as "normal" phd2 and can be used for DS imaging as normal.

The Wiki gives instructions on installation i.e. you should install in a separate folder and run phd2.planetary as a 2nd instance which means that it wont affect your  "normal" phd2 settings

14 hours ago, skybadger said:

Are you guiding on a separate imager in this picture . Does this work by guiding on the high Res high scale picture from the main imaging camera ?

It works with the guide scope/camera in exactly the same way as "normal" phd2 for dark sky (see first photo)

First of all, why would you want to guide on the Sun?
Well its very handy for those long animations of an active region or prominence. I typically have to re-adjust my framing every few frames and over the course of a couple of hours this can become a pain, and you end up with drift causing the loss of part of the image when stacking.
I had looked into the Hinode solar guider but it's been out of stock in the UK for a while and it is expensive, so when the phd2.planetary project came along I was very interested, this is a custom version of phd2 for solar, lunar, and planetary imaging.
The project is still in beta testing and the version I used was RC5 so they are getting close to a full release.

I made a filter with Baader solar film ND5 for my guidescope and tested exposures with an ASI120MM I had lying about doing nothing. The image was far too bright at minimum exposure & gain so I added a continuum filter on the camera nosepiece which got me a useable result although the exposures were still surprisingly short at 5ms

I am very familiar with phd2 for seep sky imaging so I found things quite easy to set up, there is a guide at https://github.com/Eyeke2/phd2.planetary/wiki The only new bit was a button beside the "brain button" (with a sun/moon icon) which allows you to configure the Edge detection threshold and a "time lapse" which stops phd2 trying to make adjustments at the solar exposure rate. Essentially, phd2 will check guide position every (exposure_rate + time_lapse)ms, In deep sky, you'd be aiming between 0.5s and 5s depending on the mount type. I tested this with a 1000ms timelapse.

I had a nice sunny day for testing on Saturday the 18th although the seeing wasn't great and noticeably deteriorated during the test run of 1hr 50min.
There wasn't a huge amount of action going on but I did catch a nice little flare.
Setup was a skywatcher ED120, Quark chromosphere and ASI174MM with a Baader 35nm Ha filter as an internal ERF.
Guidescope was an Astro essentials 60mm with an ASI120MM.
Mount was a ZWO AM5

To cut this short, it works, and it works well, I am sure there is room for improvement as I tinker with the settings but my 120mm rig stayed bang on target for the near 2 hours of my run without any intervention from me. The guide figures wouldn't be acceptable for deep sky but are fine for Solar.
Thanks to all involved in the project, you have done a fantastic job.

As a bonus it has saved my £750 on buying a Hinode so does it replace a Hinode?
Not necessarily, if you want to be as mobile as possible or don't want to be running a laptop or carry a guide scope with 2nd camera etc.
If, like me, you just work from a "garden observatory" phd2,planetary is ideal.

The setup

Guiding

The test target was AR3685 start time 09:35, End time 11:24 (UT)

I haven't posted anything here in a while as I mainly hang out on Solarchat these days but I need to get back into the habit 😀

Friday the 10th was a fantastic morning here in Scotland, I now have 464Gb data (Ha, Ca-K, WL) to process !
Here are a few first looks at what I have manage to get.

Capture details:

H-alpha, 120mm scope with Daystar Quark & ASI174MM.
Ca-K, 120mm scope stopped down to f15, Lunt B1200 Ca-K module, ASI290MM with 1.5x Barlow on nosepiece
G-Band , 120mm scope stopped down 86mm (seeing was deteriorating) , Baader herschel wedge, ASI290MM, 2x Barlow, ND0.9, Altair G-Band filter.
All on AM5 mount

Ca-K

H-alpha

H-alpha (inverted proms)

WL (G-Band)

Aurora

As a bonus from AR3664 , we got a spectacular auroral display last night - right above the house for a full 360°, incredible!

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

1 hour ago, IDM said:

Great image. I am awaiting delivery of a Quark and wondering/dithering over what camera to partner with it. Could you let us know your camera and image acquisition details.

thanks

Ian

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.

15 minutes ago, Steve Ward said:

Perfect timing sir ... ☺️

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

52 minutes ago, Dave Smith said:

Fantastic.

Dave

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

54 minutes ago, Peter Drew said:

It's been hovering there most of today and is still there now at 18.40pm.    🙂

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).