AbsolutelyN

Super Adrian, very detailed. I tried OIII with the 200mm last night and got much better results that I expected so possibly worth a crack at more than just HA.

Currently too windy here and poor seeing to get a good image and I can't seem to connect to any of the nasa solar websites. Pretty sure it was not there when I looked this morning. Hopefully it's not me getting it completely wrong and one just rotating out of view ... !

Thanks ... yes it's 10:47 but 9:47 in universal time.

Only managed three good frames between 9:33 and 9:47. The rest of the time was completely cloudy. You could see it at times but always through cloud. Lucky to get three though I guess.

Just made a quick animation of all 3 frames I managed

This is the best I managed today, taken at 09:47 UT (10:47 BST). There were only around three extremely brief clear windows lasting seconds. Typically yesterday was totally clear. 250-pds with 2600mc - 10 frames stacked. Animation below ... 9:33 to 9:47 UT Colour animation

Cloudy here in Harrogate but we just got a tiny gap with about 10 second totally clear and managed to gab this.

This is 21 hours on NGC 6888 - 3.5 hours taken last night with 250pds and 2600mc and the HA and OIII taken with RASA 8 + 1600MM last June. Full res on astrobin - https://www.astrobin.com/snvinq/C/

Sounds amazing, would love to see some images. Always wanted one of those but just seem too expensive.

Incredible!

Good luck with it, I'm sure you'll get some great images with the beast - Jupiter and Saturn I assume in the morning. I've switched to a 200mm lens for a change but will have a crack at them eventually. I guess the plus side of planetary is that you can really push the mount as it doesn't have to track for minutes ... but a lot easier on a more hefty mount. I've got a CEM120 on order but might be months before it arrives. The Tri-Pier has turned up though so I've sourced an adapter and have just mounted the AZEQ6 on it. Makes the sky watcher tripod look like a toy. Hopefully it will help and bit with the 250.

Hi Nicolàs. That must have been taken early on, just after I started. I used the 3.8 as I can get much faster shutter speeds - less than 2ms. But unfortunately I could also only get hold of A4 sized film so I 3D printed my own solar filter holder that stops the scope down to 200mm so it's not using the full 250mm aperture. The solar continuum filter is very good but I found an OIII filter is also very good too. Seeing is the ultimate limiter - sometimes I can't even get focus at all as it's just a blur - so very much luck of what atmosphere you happen to have and perseverance. Get the right conditions and I'm sure you'll blow the socks off my image with a 11" scope.

Thanks Craig. The 250pds has unexpectedly turned out to be best scope I've ever had - and a fraction of the cost of most previous ones too. Looking forward to seeing your 300mm images though. I originally wanted to get one of those but they were all out of stock and it's even more over mount limits than the 250. How is your EQ6 handling it? It looked to have some serious counterweights!

Sounds very interesting thanks.

Brill thanks - I only discovered ImPPG yesterday and have not used it yet - didn't know it aligned images. Will give it a try. Aligning manually inn Photoshop is very time consuming!

Thanks Adam, hope it gets you some nice images. I'm going to keep an eye out for the larger sheets to make a full 10" filter but I'm guessing it would only be of use with exceptional seeing. 8" is certainly working well. This was taken with a 3x barlow - 3600mm focal length. My scope is hooked up to my PC where I was working all day so I just used a 5 min repeat timer, the crosshair target in SharpCap and nudged it to a specific sunspot as a reference point. It never drifted far in 5 mins so it was just a few seconds work every 5 mins to position and then hit capture. So very easy to capture ... but very time consuming, especially to process

I had to select an anchor point to align all the files to for a point of reference because after stacking they were not even close to being aligned. I chose the uppermost central sunspot so that barely moves at all. Not sure if that affects how they appear to be moving relative to everything else?

Thanks Damian. Processing the volume of data was harder than capturing it in the first place. Very time consuming but amazing that you can capture the movement like this. Never thought such things would be possible back when I was looking at sunspots through a scrap of welding glass in the school playground 🙂

Capturing the data on one of those rare completely cloudless days is only half the task, you then have to spend all night processing it too 🙂

None taken , I was was just meaning it could have been better as reasonable seeing was quite frequent but I had to draw a line on how much data to capture as it gets out of hand quickly. For me it seemed best in the morning, then mid afternoon. I lose the sun 4:30 unfortunately, would have loved to get a few more hours movement. The scope isn't on grass either so I suspect the ground around has an impact. Out of about 120 images only a handful stand out as being particularly good seeing.

Thanks Stu, I could have probably mostly ironed out the seeing if I'd taken more frames but finding space to save them all was getting quite problematic (about to delete all 1.7tb to free up space). The wind became the bigger problem later on.

Time-lapse taken yesterday showing AR2827 starting to merge together. 250PDS, ZWO 178MM and some Baader solar film - over about 9.5 hours every 3 to 6 minutes. https://www.astrobin.com/lci71z/

Agreed. The R lenses actually put me off Canon due to the very high lens prices.

Taken in a lovely moment of clarity this morning. 250PDS, 178MM and Baader solar film.

Have now made this into an animation spanning about an hour: https://www.astrobin.com/pv5buw/