Rusted

You make a very good point. When I first bought the T5 I set it to accept all my imaging videos. However it forgot my instructions as soon as the laptop was turned off. From then on it completely ignored any new instructions. "Operator error," no doubt. I'll have to try again.

H-a and W/L today. Bright here but thin cloud and a white sky. Full cream, milky white!

Wow!What Incredible clarity and image scale! I thought In was doing well getting visible granulation with 3m f/l from a 2x Barlow 6" f/10 and 640x480.

Agreed on all of the above. i7, USB3, 16GB Ram, 1TB of onboard SSD. Lots of UWSB3 ports. Hubs don't seem to work as well IME. I regularly capture at 400fps from my ASI174. For hours on end! This makes for huge video files. I bought a 15.6" ASUS N552V a couple of years ago and by sheer luck it had most of the right bells and whistles. EXCEPT for a measly little 250GB onboard SSD. That's only worth a couple of hours of solar imaging at most! So I bought a 1TB Samsung T5 external USB3 SSD. But now I waste valuable imaging time transferring files. Just because the onboard SSD has filled up. [Again!] I could get a bigger onboard SSD but worry about reloading Windows 10. Forget about onboard screen size and get a nice big, quality monitor for imaging. I went for a 27" HD AOC. Quite pricey but wonderful for imaging! Do you really need a laptop for your imaging? A PC might be cheaper for the same specs.

I approve of motor focusing. It saves touching the telescope. It provides micro control of focus. Which you'd never achieve manually. No need for great expense UNLESS you want software repeatability. I made a simple "Skywatcher" DC motor drive for my 3.5" Feather Touch focuser. Even with the telescope vertical it easily overcame the weight of my massive 2" Lacerta Herschel prism. Plus the weight of the massive FT draw tube. A toothed "timing" belt runs from a small sprocket on the motor shaft. It drives the black knob on the gold, slow motion side. Controlled by a HiTech Astro DC focuser box. The belt only slips [smoothly] when you go past the draw tube end stops. No modification required to the FT. I made a simple, plastic clamp for the motor from a kitchen cutting board. https://fullerscopes.blogspot.com/2019/07/12th-july-2019-skywatcher-dc-motor.html?m=0 Covered in a series of of illustrated posts starting at that date. I ran into difficulties with the HiTech Astro controller driver. Later sorted with an update.

re: New AR: Here's all I can mange in these seeing conditions: It might improve later. One using 800x600 with a 2x WO Barlow. One with 640x480 with NO Barlow. The mono image is a SharpCap "snapshot" [a still image] with only a reduction in size. Just to show how poor the seeing is if we had to rely on stills.

Nope. Not that one. I'm just going off to the observatory now so I'll try to capture that one.

Not today. I captured a pale oval at SE [8 o'clock] near the limb yesterday afternoon. Not sure if this is what you meant?

And another daub!

I thought I was doing quite well until I saw what others were posting!

Thanks Dave. I made crude, prom animation a little while back- Not impressive! More fuzzy daubs: Perhaps I should give them a canvas texture and pretend they are modern art?

More images from this afternoon: Continuing warm and sunny at 61F with very little wind today. Seeing variable. The filament is giving different impressions of depth as it changes. All images 640x480 in SharpCap, AS!2, ImPPG, coloured, cropped and enlarged to 500 in PhotoFiltre7.

AR12759 continues its steady plod across the disk as it slowly decays. Poor seeing at first, better late morning and then poor again after lunch. 10.37, 11,38,11.58,12.29 and 13.05 [all CET] A nice overlying filament. A small patch of plage off to the west.

Thanks Jon. De-focusing means touching the telescope and losing the target. Bagging it with a thin, translucent bag can be done without touching the telescope.

FireCapture hasn't changed at all. Still hopelessly unfriendly! Dark red with microscopic text. Seriously?

Later images as the seeing goes south. Nothing much visible coming out of AS!2. It is all from poking and prodding in ImPPG and Photofiltre7.

It looks as if it is being absorbed. Nice long filament overlying the AR. Wind blowing the 'scope around.

I'll take another look.

Thanks for those suggested FireCapture settings. Rant/ From increasingly, distant memory I couldn't use FireCapture because it had no facility for high res. screens. [Years after such screens became popular!] Everything on the screen was sub-microscopic and largely consisted of totally inscrutable, alien symbols. They were utterly meaningless to me! I tried readjusting the screen res. to match this one app. but don't have enough brain cells left to learn a whole new language of hieroglyphs. This did not help much either. Because now the drop down, text size completely mismatched the alien symbols! Just finding the correct symbol for switching between automatic night screen and [desired] daylight viewing [for solar imaging] took me several, completely wasted days! I needed increased clarity just to be able to see the silly symbols with my strongest reading glasses. Never again! Life is already too short and rapidly becoming shorter! SharpCap speaks human and is as user-friendly as one could possibly wish for. It runs on autopilot as far as I am concerned. And, I can read everything on the screen and recognise the meanings of the [very few] helpful symbols completely without effort. Rant over.

Nice surface texture without over-sharpening. What amazing scale!

Thanks Geoff. Sorry to hear about your cloud. Wall to wall sunshine over here. I had to pack up for lunch when it became far too windy to continue. Going back out to try again as the wind veers to the SE. So I may get a little more shelter now I'm past the meridian. It has reached 55F, warmest this year, but I'm wearing all my winter gear including gloves! 🥶

Thanks. I had a look at both of these, this morning, but they seem more oriented towards night time imaging. Further study will certainly follow in the hope of greater understanding of their potential.

Thank you vlaiv for your very useful and thorough response. Hopefully it will help to improve my results from making much better informed decisions. Today I started using Mono16 and SER files for the very first time. I have always avoided both until now. I have not tried flats yet but solar imaging experts have suggested placing a translucent [not transparent] bag over the objective for this. I've used PIPP before but not routinely in my normal processing sequence. I shall have to give this a try too. Thanks again.

More images from this morning. Giving up for lunch. Far too windy now. The telescope is blowing about too much!

Yet another image: New colour = Sepia + Saturation.