Yawning Angel

This shows is 3 hours of activity of the 'finger' prom, captured from around 9am - midday on the 31st. 1000 frames captures every 2 minutes, 50% stacked in AS!3 and sharpened in Registax. Aligned in ImPPG (what sorcery is this?!) then compiled into a video in PS

Tal100r PST mod / Altair Hypercam174m / 2.5x Powermate

Quite please with how this turned out

Having been clouded out at home for weeks, it was time for a road trip! Morecambe bay has been a great site for long exposure terrestrial shots in the past, so since Clear Outside, Scope Nights and the Met office all agreed it was clear off I went

I arrived and parked up for about 20:30 to wander down to the end of the pier and get set up. There were some clouds hanging about on the horizon, but I had reasonable hopes that the fairly stiff off-shore breeze would clean it up

Sunset was 21:30:

Since I was testing settings (it's a new camera, so it's the rules!) I tried out the on camera interval shooting in the hopes of catching changes in the light as the sun set...

That seemed to turn out okay, so then the wait for the sky to darken. I took a lot of pictures of clouds, panoramic shots and long exposures of waves hitting pier stanchions etc to pass the time till the main event. 

So, Sony a6400 @ 24mm f/4. 4 second exposure:

...and a short time-lapse, because why not?

Directly behind where I was shooting, Saturn and Jupiter played chase across the sky and the ISS wandered past to see what I was up to. I could have stayed all night, but at 00:30 my tea flask was empty and that meant time for home, cold but happy. Thawed out on the 45 minute drive back

See, it's not always grim up north!

This is an 11 panel mosaic, shot around 9pm on the 25th with a C8 & asi178mm. Seeing was mixed especially with heat from my house roof after a 30 degree day!

Today was a little less windy here, so I was able to get a little time this morning to grab some data. This is 50% stacked of 1000 frames captured, Altair Hypercam 174m / Tal100 PST (x2.5). 2nd stack for 200 for the prom

500 frames captured every 3 minutes over 2.5 hours. Stacked in AS!3 and wavelets in Registax. 50 final frames coloured and aligned in Photoshop. Tal 100 / Altair Hypercam 174m

Single frame shown below the video

Enjoy

Today's solar activity, captured with an Altair Hypercam 174m / Tal100r PST mod. The animation is 3 frames between 10:16 and 10:24 this morning

Dodging annoying high cloud and haze all day, but ended up with some usable data:

ZWO asi1600mm 1000 frame captures, 25% stacked in AS3!, then RGB combine and fettle in PS

Sun gazing yesterday. A little bit of surface interest and a lovely flame shaped prominence. Very mixed seeing and some high haze

Some glorious clear skies, occasionally splodged with the white fluffy menaces, so seeing some interest after a quick GONG check the scope went on and the roof opened

ZWO asi178mm. 2 layer composite for prom and surface. Surface inverted and colourised. Starting to see a little of the grid patterning showing through, although it hasn't overwhelmed the image

TAL 100RS Stage 2 PST Mod (still on loan from @Uplooker - thank you!)

Thank you! I’ll try running the stacks again, now it’s 2am 🤪

Some of the caps where a bit thin on quality, so we’ll see what happens!

Last nights full moon at 100 megapixels! 27 panel mosaic

Celestron C8 @ 2032mm. ZWO asi178mm with a ProPlanet IR band pass 642mn filter

27 x 500 frames, 20ms per frame. 5% stacked per stack. 18 gig captured

Mosaic compiled in Microsoft ICE. Deconvolution and wavelets in PixInsight. Background cleanup and image balancing in Photoshop

There are a couple I’d consider : The asi290 is blisteringly fast , and the asi174 has global shutter - but since the scope is only loaned, I’m not really looking to  invest😀

The asi120mm I have is faster, but lower res and nosier. I started there, and then swapped to the 178

6 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

nearer 50 FPS

The 178 at full resolution gets about 30fps. It's the trade off for it being 6 megapixels. It's not the ideal camera for solar, but its the most suitable I own. ROI it will speed up, so I've been playing with that today, but high cloud has made it all a bit mushy

1 hour ago, Pete Presland said:

What is exposure time when capturing?

I think it would have been 20ms?

It made me look again at the data and I think this one comes out a little better. Captured about 30 minutes later, I've combined it with the same surface capture frame

44 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

Do you think 500/3

Typo...500 frames @ 30fps, sequenced to capture every 3 mins. The softness is more than likely down to the processing 😳

Continuing my adventure with the loaned TAL 100 PST stage 2. A bit windy today, but all good practice. The asi178 isn't blisteringly fast at 30 fps <typo fixed>, but the results are crisp

I've been setting it running taking 500 frames every 3 minutes and letting it do a couple of hours whilst doing lockdown things (mainly home schooling the hobbits!)

I've been lucky enough to borrow a TAL 100 PST mod from @Uplooker and being furloughed, I'm getting to play a little

A bit too windy, but 1st light with the ZWO asi178mm, but here's 25% of 500 frames for the disk and the prominence. Stacked in AS!3, wavelets in Registax. Colour and merged in Photoshop

08/04/20 I failed to correctly overlap a complete row of mosaic panels, but the data was okay.

Seemed a waste to ditch the capture, so here’s 2/3rds of the full moon, 12 panel mosaic, inverted because why not!

Celestron C8 / iOptron CEM60 / ZWO asi120mc-s

Tonight's waxing moon, 04/04/20. LRGB with a Ha filter for the Luminance channel

Thats cracking! Well done

I'm sure we've all had one of those "Crumbs, I didn't realise it had cleared up" moments?

30th March, I'd been bemoaning the weather turning cloudy, as any astronomer would, as I'm always fated to miss the crescent moon. The previous nights had been gloriously clear but she was too far gone behind my house to catch.

But not last night! The sudden realisation from the comfort of the sofa that the clouds had done one, and it was clear! The moon was sitting just a little higher which sent me running to roll the roof off and get going. After some strong words with the mount along the lines of "GMT / BST settings be damned, just get it pointing the right way!" I was able to grab 2000 frames each RG&B with about 10 minutes spare before moon met roofline!

Not quite the delicate shining sliver of earlier in the week, but its a keeper, I think

On 18/07/2018 at 22:58, mikeonnet said:

I was seeing exactly this on my SWED80.  I'd since moved to autofocusing, so the mask had been retired, but the issue had always niggled the back of my mind as unresolved

When I changed my focuser, I initially focused by hand before refitting the motor - no bananas! Doing this made me consider that it had been a collimation problem. Looking back, it happened when I swapped from a dslr to dedicated mono camera and spent some time finessing the slip out of the stock focuser to hold the weight more reliably

I might be biased, or more experienced but the first imaged after the focuser swap was the sharpest I've ever produced 🙂

At this stage, you can easily add some bracing tape, if you want to avoid the diagonals : Have a search for "galvanised bracing tape". You nail it corner to corner, inside of outside the frame, then skin over it - and for once, it's cheap 🙂

Very tidy work Dave!

Given the recent winds, what diagonal bracing method are you going for or will your cladding be holding it square?