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 ... !

2 minutes ago, StuartT said:

Outstanding! Don't you mean 10:47 tho?

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! 

6 hours ago, CraigT82 said:

Yeah not too well in all honesty! Will be fine for lucky imaging though and I'm hoping to get first light tomorrow morning. It really needs an EQ8 but then that is just more weight to move around. Maybe something I can aspire to once we move house and I can have a permanent set up. 

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. 

1 hour ago, inFINNity Deck said:

Hi Tristan,

very nice animation. Did you use ND5.0 or ND3.8 foil? From the Astrobin-page I learned you used a continuum filter as well.

That morning I took the image shown below using a C11 EdgeHD, 4x PowerMate, ZWO ASi174MM, a green filter, and ND5.0 foil. It is not as sharp as yours though.

Nicolàs

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. 

26 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

Wow top work Tristan.... is there anything that 250 pds can't do?! 

 

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!

14 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Excellent! I recently have been looking into solar guiding. Will drop you a PM. 

Sounds very interesting thanks. 

8 minutes ago, GreatAttractor said:

Excellent animation.

About the rotation - I haven't seen anything like it either. Some pores circling each other, yes, but not a rotating developed spot.

 

You might be interested in ImPPG's image alignment feature.

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! 

24 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

Tristan, that is class!  I have successfully used the solar film holder you made for me, havent got it processed yet.  Did you use a barlow here?  How did you track it over 9.5 hours?

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

7 hours ago, Kitsunegari said:

i think the sunspot rotation is the most impressive part of this entire capture,  i dont think another amateur has captured this affect ever.

 

You may be the first, and its worth investigating.   Ive never seen them rotate in SDO captures before and ive watched them for 10 years.

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? 

8 minutes ago, TakMan said:

Superb, the end result has paid back all your effort.... and amount of data!

Damian

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 🙂

11 minutes ago, Nik271 said:

Very nice to see sunspots in action, thanks for the video! This proves long summer days of sunshine are good for something after all

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 🙂 

1 minute ago, Stu said:

No criticism intended, it’s just something that we are all at the mercy of. It was very clear to me yesterday, the difference between observing in very variable conditions at lunchtime vs very stable seeing after 5pm, the views were stunning.

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. 

2 minutes ago, Stu said:

Amazing stuff! Had some great views here visually yesterday evening. Interesting to see the variation in seeing through the time lapse. 

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/

2 minutes ago, Space Hopper said:

They are out and about, but they are very, very expensive.

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/