Rusted

Burp!

It's well worth seeing. It reminds me of a mud splash from throwing a stone. Or a lump of coal in this case. Here's one I did earlier.

I can do "tomato" suns if you insist. Strictly by request.

Wind, rain, more wind and more rain. More cloud than you can shake a fist at! Much more "processed" than usual.

Probably irrelevant to this discussion but I now routinely use a 2.6x GPC in my 6" H-alpha f/10 1500mm refractor. I fit the GPC without hesitation before each solar session since discovering that its resulting images were no worse than without it. I am using an ASI174 at high frame rates at 800x600 in a PST modified 150/10 H-a in short, selective bursts while constantly monitoring the image on a 27" quality screen for lucky moments of best seeing in the shade of a dome. I have never gained anything in image quality from stopping down any of my refractors over the years. Nor by reducing the magnification to a lower level than average. I have experimented with stopping down my old 6" f/8 Celestron CR150 "Kaleidoscope," Vixen 90, iStar 180/12 R35 and iStar 150/10 H-a. None of them showed the exercise of stopping down to be worthwhile. Though I did once set fire to an experimental cardboard ring in the dewshield of my old 6". There are a number of solar imagers now achieving truly remarkable results from SCTs up to 30cm using Airies full aperture ERFs in the right seeing conditions. Usually early morning and late afternoon. A habit I have adopted myself. Since it regularly provides stunning clarity and steadiness of greatly enlarged images. Meanwhile, the incredible scale and detail of the SCT solar images are more suggestive of orbiting imaging platforms than amateur astronomers working from the ground. Solar Chat has shared examples of these incredible images. According to reports on CN it was established some years ago that an optimised, long focus Newtonian of between 30-35cm aperture would trash anything else in the park on planetary image quality in good seeing. It required careful optimisation to ensure thermal issues were addressed, a high quality mirror and a suitably small high quality secondary, were well collimated in a thermally neutral [cardboard] tube with "cooling fans" to scrub the front surface free of convection currents and speed the glass to ambient temperatures. No doubt thinner, or meniscus mirror blanks, suitably supported, would provide even better results. No doubt the argument could easily be made that all the other telescopes present of much larger aperture. Or even large and costly APOs. Were all much too "warm" to perform to their theoretical limits. A bit like bringing a large and jewel encrusted knife to a gunfight? Stop me if I'm rambling.

The new spot is forging ahead, much further onto the visible disk now. The seeing was fairly steady as I started my imaging session just before 9am. It soon went to pot!

Thanks David. There is a surprisingly different appearance. What was even more odd is that the PST BF provided a much less thermally agitated image. Almost still. The B1200 needed loads of gain and exposure. While the PST BF needed no gain and almost zero exposure.

And now for something, completely different: The PST BF instead of the Lunt B1200. Same telescope but a very different appearance:

Isn't it awful how comets totally ignore the Golden Ratio, Rule of Thirds and the Golden Spiral?

Up early to a bright start but cloud has moved in. It is going to be one of those days! First images: Highly contoured. Realistic or an artifact of [over] processing?

I had exactly the same problem with my '174. No luck in a [recommended] Startech USB 3 hub. Works fine straight into the laptop. I bought a 3m USB3 cable for it and that worked fine until it was badly stretched by an errant slew. Gone back to the 2m flat ZWO cable until I can replace the damaged cable.

I think I'd have nightmares!! 🤣

Thanks John. Clouded out here again. Feels like rain. I wanted to get a better white light image!

Visible in white light and H-alpha! Smoke 'em if you've got 'em. But let's be careful out there.

The cloud is endless and the seeing awful but I managed to capture the new spot on the limb. I have my 88mm spotting scope rigged up with Baader solar foil filter. G9 at prime focus for WL. I should have used the G9 viewfinder but it is a real neck wringer around lunch time! I'll try again later if the sun is still visible and the seeing has settled. Dreadful images:

I was obsessed with optics before I was a teenager. So I eventually found a job at an optical company. The work was repetitive, boring and routine. I had to cycle 26 miles a day just to get there and back. The only real upside was making achromats and prisms for my own projects. I liked making solar spectroscopes back then. The best job I ever had was working every waking hour. Being a self-employed antique clock restorer. In the unheated garden shed. For an absolute pittance. It meant I could play with things I loved but could never afford. While skilfully undoing centuries of botcher's crimes against innocent, inanimate objects. All, so that crooked, antique dealers could live in unbelievable luxury. By selling desirable objects. Usually stolen from recent widows and done up as cheaply as possible.

Learning to see is a major part of amateur astronomy. All things requiring any special human skill need time to develop. It cannot be bought. Make haste slowly and savour the journey of personal discovery. The Moon is far more rewarding than planets and quite magical. I can still clearly remember all the details of the first time I saw the Moon properly. It was through a friend's telescope, I was a young teenager and it was 60 years ago. I like the suggestion of a medium sized 100mm ED refractor on a popular mounting.i A refractor is so much more than a pure astronomy tool. It is the optical, Swiss army knife. With an erecting diagonal it can be used to admire distant views and for bird watching. When properly and safely filtered you can watch the sun change over time. A whole hobby in itself. The refractor is small enough and handy enough to store very easily. Yet is light enough to be carried outside easily. Without ever needing optical alignment. A refractor can be turned into a nice big camera lens with very little effort or expense. Do not get greedy for size of telescope! Larger instruments spend far more time in storage than ever see the sky. It is the most common mistake and can soon lead to a complete loss of interest. What I call instrumental inertia: Been there. Done that. We all have. The huge physical and mental hurdle you have placed between yourself and the sky grows constantly larger. The psychological effort just to get up and leave the cosy warmth of TV or browsing becomes insurmountable. Spending time waiting for a large instrument to stabilize is precious observing opportunities wasted. Larger instruments are far more sensitive to poor seeing conditions. They soon become "fair weather" friends and who needs those kinds of friends?

I used 12 of those tapered concrete wotsits to hold up/down my observatory and pier. I should have asked for a discount for bulk! Or free capstones? A Druid. Esq.

EDIT: [A belated] Diolch yn fawr iawn Boyo! I wonder if they ever fixed the Caernarfon light dome?

My wife is fully supportive of my being at home. Instead of cycling along some distant road amongst the speeding drunks and drug heads. So she would probably thank you for pointing me in the right direction before it was too late. Even if you did cost me a small fortune in scrap metal.

The trees are far too large to do do anything safely with them by amateur means. Being on the northern boundary they don't bother me much. Mind you, the trees out of sight of the camera make these look like bonsai.

I bought a brand new pair of 10x50 Zeiss Jenoptem decades ago. They were out of alignment from the very first trial at home. The shop in Bangor N.Wales was not interested. Told me I must have dropped them. I hadn't. They were treated with kid gloves but they gave me nausea. So I set them up on a fence post and adjusted the objective rings to realign the images. They have remained perfectly aligned for the ensuing three decades. I have a dozen pairs of charity shop bought binos. £5-15. Almost all of them are misaligned porro prism. They still make good finders. Bung them in a bit of PVC plumbing pipe for an inverted image.

I looked back through this thread and it seems I was still H-a Negative back in 2018. This is my home made, H-a Positive, iStar 6" f/10 H-alpha, PST mod, on my home-made GEM. All housed in my home-made, 3m, trapezoid dome on top of my 2 storey, home-made, octagonal observatory. Full aperture 160mm Baader D-ERF, PST etalon, 50mm KG3, 50mm Baader 35nM H-a, Maeir ITF, Lunt B1200 BF and ZWO ASI174 camera. My L-shaped, imaging desk is isolated from, but wrapped around the 14' high, pyramidal, timber/ply pier. The 27" monitor is hung from the pier on a fully articulated, universal bracket and shows a typical view as I process a nice prom in AS!3. It is difficult to be far enough away to get it all in within the confines of a 3m 10' dome. Being retired, I practically live in my observatory whenever the sun is shining. Sometimes before 8am to after 7pm on the sun alone. Longer still, if I image the Moon. So the cost per hour, is dropping like a stone. The telescope is superb in white light and on the moon too, without removing the pre-etalon filters. I just fit a different rear end. You can blame all this on Sir Peter. He turned me to the Light Side so perhaps we ought to call him "St. Peter."

It's good to eliminate alternatives rationally. How brief are novas and supernovas?

It's odd that none of these 'townies' has noticed that most cars are fitted with headlamps.