Rusted

Great start with lots of fine detail. I second the use of Autostakkert [AS!3] and ImPPG. After some practice at both you can be seeing a completed image in under a couple of minutes from capture.

Nice!

A superb set of images!

Later images as the seeing conditions improved. AR3110 & 3111

Wet, windy and overcast morning. Followed by sunny periods after lunch. Too good a chance to miss. I hadn't captured AR3110 yet. AR3007, 3110 & 3111 respectively. Resized to 700 to look prettier on the forum.

80 minutes is truly infinite. For those of us with the attention span of a goldfish.

Thank you for sharing your excellent photographs of this historical observatory.

Thanks for your encouragement.

A cloudy morning gave way to sunshine. I quickly captured three spot groups before the seeing went to mush.

Thank you for your encouragement.

A late return to the obs. to capture steadier seeing. Three images and a composite of all three using Ms ICE.

Thanks.

I once ground, polished and figured a 16" mirror to f5. Bought the 18" PVC tube. Took it home. Tried to stand it up in the shed. Too tall by miles! Dogh! 😱

Thank you Peter. It was an amazing spot group.

Image of AR3102 captured on the 19th in soft and thermally seeing conditions.

Spray foam is rigid. Not what you want at all. Soft sponge foam is less vibration conducting over small areas. Make that area large enough and the foam becomes essentially rigid. The pressure per square unit is not high enough to cause deflection. Spiders must like observatories. After a week of cloudy weather mine had webs spanning the depth and breadth of the 10' Ø dome. I almost felt sorry for them when I slewed the telescope and broke all their hard work.

Just for clarity: The prism is not for tuning. It is ONLY for focusing the PST. It is designed to fold the optical path, inside the prism, to make the telescope more compact. Its support and movement mechanism is crude and a well known problem. The "discounted return" issue raises possible existing faults within this PST. Only with the permission of your vendor I would start with the prism. If the prism is badly aligned it could be the culprit for the image asymmetry. Dismantling the PST without their written permission [as proof of agreement] will void any warranty.

Hi Reeny I had a little play with PhotoFiltre7 image handling software. Just extra gamma and contrast. Cropped and Resized to 700 pixels for the forum. You have captured quite a lot of detail. The offset detail/brightness may be a tilting problem somewhere. Or, the etalon misbehaving. If you are using a standard PST it could be the focusing prism. They have a bad reputation for getting out of alignment. Checking this would involve removing the side of the black box.

Thank you! Generous to a fault! Like all solar imagers.

I recognise those clouds! 😱

Since you brought it up: If I was being really pedantic [as is my lifelong burden] I'd suggest the correct term is white light. i.e. Two words. Easily proven by Google's automatic spelling checker as you type whitelight or even Whitelight but not white light.

The ease with which you lifted that huge cage was ample proof of the sophistication of the lightweight materials you are using.

The sky was almost solid overcast for much of the afternoon. I captured a few videos between the clouds. Resized to 600x600.

That's why they call it "lucky imaging!" I hear that rice in a sealed, poly bag with the soggy electronics, is good.

What a beautiful set of images!