michael.h.f.wilkinson

Will be watching out for this one. It would be comet number 40 for me. Fingers crossed.

Just made a little trhee-pane mosaic from last night's aurora. Each pane a 7 s exposure using my Canon EOS M6 mk-ii and Sigma 16 mm F/1.4 lens. Processed in Affinity Photo, MS-ICE, and Gimp

1 hour ago, FenlandPaul said:

Well done, Michael. Great capture. I had some colour here at dusk, but it faded quite rapidly.

That red band is a SAR arc I believe.

I think you are right, it was also just discernible in photos taken in the opposite direction.  I will post more later

Just managed to capture my best aurora shots. Images just north of the Hamlet of Dorkwerd, near Groningen, the Netherlands. Taken with my Canon EOS M6 mk-ii with Sigma 16 mm F/1.4.

Note the off reddish vertical band on the left. Must be some form of aurora too.

Will process the lot tomorrow.

Nice one!

Great image. Lovely detail in the outer regions and the core not blown out.

On 18/07/2024 at 17:08, Grump Martian said:

Well I settled for Pentax Papilio 6.5 x 21. I love that they are really comfortable to use with the lower 6.5 x magnification.

FLO were great helping me with my choice. I did decide on a monocular. I tried the Opticron 32 mm & 42 mm. But they did not suit me. So I am grateful to FLO & all of your advice.

They are really quirky. I like that.

Neat looking little pair of bins. Pentax makes some amazing optics.

On 12/07/2024 at 22:51, ollypenrice said:

I have the Leica Ultravid 10x25, now eye-wateringly expensive. They are excellent but come with a warning: don't assume that their light weight makes holding a 10x binocular easier. I find that it doesn't and may do the opposite. A heavier instrument at 10x may work as an anvil to soak up tremors.  I'm now in my seventies and would rather prefer an 8x, I think.

The high contrast of the Leicas does work on the sky and I've seen M27 in the small Ultravids. (My go-to astro bins are Leica 8x42 Trinovids.)

Olly

I should have let you look through the little Zeiss 8x25 bins. They sound like just the thing you are looking for (slightly less eye-wateringly expensive too).

I remember looking through the 8x42 Trinovid you had years ago. Brilliant piece of astro kit. I was worried for a moment I would no longer appreciate the views through my Helios Apollo 15x70 after looking through the Leica, but the sheer aperture compensated for the slightly lower image quality.

On an EQ mount, you might use a dual mount bar, but I do not think this would be practical on the AZ mount you have, unless you use some kind of L-bracket used for big binoculars. The problem with that (and the piggy-back solution) would be that although the total weight might be OK, the torque on the mounting would be rather high, because the centre of mass would be far from the mount's dovetail clamp. These "single-armed fork mounts" tend not to like this. A full fork mount would not work either, as the two OTAs would not fit.

Very nice indeed

32 minutes ago, clwonghk said:

Thank you Michael. With your experience with your L-extreme filter and H-alpha filter, would you say they both are able to deliver the same result, i.e. enhancing the red nebulae? 

They both do, but the L-eXtreme will also capture other wavelengths than H-alpha, so the enhancement of H-alpha regions may be slightly lower. On th eplus side, you also get O-II and some H-beta signal in the blue and green channel of your image, which might be used to enhance the emission nebula in other ways. I haven't made a head-to-head comparison, however.

I have the L-eXtreme  filter, not the H-a for my 550D. I do use H-alpha filters on my monochrome deep sky cameras, so it is difficult for me to say which would be better for your purpose. The red channel of the an RGB image obtained with an L-eXtreme filter will contain mainly H-alpha, with some S-II thrown in for good measure. It will also contain more continuum than when using an H-alpha filter. Whether that is a problem for your purpose is another matter entirely

Spotted it today. Spectacular sight

I keep a close watch on T CrB with the big Helios LightQuest 16x80 bins. No luck yet, as you will no doubt know

Note that a filter does not just cut out the unwanted LP signal, it also cuts out the photon noise that comes with that unwanted signal. Your signal to noise ratio is going to be better for H-alpha emitting objects. One drawback is that you will effectively be using just the red pixels of your sensor. The green and blue will not receive much in the way of signal (this is why narrowband imaging is usually done with monochrome cameras). To avoid this, I would consider the Optolong L-eNhance or L-eXtreme and other multi-band filters, which also pass O-III, etc. This means more of your pixels will actually get some signal.

With the 6D you will need one of these rectangular "XL" clip filters, rather than the little round ones for the APS-C systems (like my old 550D). The Optolong filters are also available in such a format. I got this result with an Optolog L-eXtreme  filter with my Canon EOS 550D (modded)

Just had the Coronado SolarMax-II 60 mm out on my morning tea break, and there is a lot going on. A large number of big ARs dot the western half of the disk, with some bright plage areas surrounding the biggest sunspot. The eastern half is less crowed, with a lone AR plus the odd filament. The show was however stolen by a very bright detached prom, around about the 4:30 position, at a surprising distance from the disk, showing up as a compact, slightly elongated blob of plasma. I cannot recall seeing a brighter one, especially at such a distance from the limb. It also remains bright as you move from blue to red wing of the H-alpha line, suggesting a lot of (turbulent) motion within it. Well worth a look.

On 20/08/2024 at 13:14, Highburymark said:

For info: the 76mm ‘Skywatcher Heliostar’ is now being promoted on a Hong Kong website - astro.promote.hk
 

Claims a bandwidth of less than 0.5 Å, which is in double-stack terrain. More of a chromosphere bandwidth than for prominences

After a dull start of the day, there was a sizable gap in the cloud cover, so I could get some more disks in Ca-K and WL.

White light:

Ca-K, grey scale:

Ca-K, pseudo colour:

Ca-K, part inverted:

Ca-K, part inverted plus pseudo colour.

Clouds rolled back in halfway through capturing the Ca-K, so I didn't get the full 4000 frames I was aiming for. Seeing was also worse, so not quite as sharp as before.

All good things come to an and, and solid cloud blocked the view of the sun, so here is an animation of the Ca-K data I captured over the last ten days

The MP4 can be dowloaded although it is a bit big (227 MB)

I will play around with the white light later.

Nice work!

Ten days of sun in a row, what luxury.

White light:

Ca-K, grey scale:

Ca-K, pseudo colour:

Ca-K, part inverted:

Ca-K, part inverted + pseudo colour:

Note the prom activity on the righthand limb.

As a bonus, two detail shots of the big ARs:

Fingers crossed for a few days more, but the forecast does not look good.

Lovely images and animation

Another glorious day, so more solar images captured with the APM 80mm F/6.

White light:

Ca-K, grey scale:

Ca-K, pseudo colour:

Ca-K, part inverted:

Ca-K, part inverted + pseudo colour:

Finally: detail shots of the biggest ARs

Both taken using the 2.5x PowerMate

For some reason APT refused to talk properly to my Canon EOS M6 mk-II, so I was reduced to using the EOS utility, which limited me to 30s exposures if I wanted to use the interval timer as well. I mounted  the little camera with my Sigma 16mm F/1.4 lens on the iOptron HEM15, and managed to take a series of 42 30s exposures at F/1.4, ISO 400, of the area around the summer triangle. I stacked these with 20 flats, darks and bias frames in Astro Pixel Processor, removed gradients, and did some final cropping and rotating in GIMP.

Frankly, I am surprised at how this lens performs at full aperture. The stars aren't perfect, and I might want to revisit the gradient removal, but I think this will be a neat lens to capture the Perseids (fingers crossed for the next two nights).

Exactly a quarter of a century ago I stood on a parking place along the road near the town of Sarreguemines in the Alsace region, and through a four-minute break in the clouds could observe  and image my first total eclipse, using my C8 on its Great Polaris mount.

The same mount is still going strong, and with the more modest aperture of the APM 80mm F/6 triplet got me yet another batch of solar disks, and a detail shot with the 2.5x PowerMate inserted.

White light:

Ca-K, grey scale:

Ca-K, pseudo colour:

Ca-K, part inverted:

Ca-K, part inverted + pseudo colour:

Detail shot in white light, this time with dust bunnies removed using flats:

25 years ago I was using the C8 with Contax RTS-II camera and Fujichrome slide film. The image below is a scan of a print of the slide, so not that good, but the original slide got water damage when moving house.

Not the best of images, but I was chuffed to bits with it