Kitsunegari

4 hours ago, Debo said:

It's a shame you didn't 😉

just cleaned it off for tomorrows session of the new active region, granted its not clouded out.

3 hours ago, Peter Drew said:

I don't recognise this PST mod "bottleneck".  Like Rusted I operate a 150mm F10 Istar PST mod.  Surely it's a case of "horses for courses"?  My interest lies with high resolution close-up visual images of solar details.  I use the standard 5mm blocking filter, 2x Barlow lens fitted to the nosepiece of a binoviewer which provides a magnification of 150x with a pair of 40mm Plossl eyepieces, the lowest power I use.  I can get about one quarter of the solar disc in view representing a 8 foot circle viewed from 4 feet with no sweetspot issues.  If I want a small scale full disc image I have a 60mm Coronado unit.      🙂

Yes, but can you put your coronado 60mm unit behind the 150mm istar currently?? 

You could do this with the 90mm collimator , and then modulate between full disc or high resolution just by altering the spacing.   Switching out the etalon is very valuable considering the variability between them all.  If its a poor sample you can trade it out for a better one without getting rid of the entire setup.  

The upgrade here is modularity, adding the ability to go from a 20mm etalon to a 90mm etalon;   is very unique piece of equipment.   I currently switch out between the coronado pst etalon(200mm plane), and a lunt ls50c etalon.(500mm plane)

This telescope is also not limited to full disc imaging, i was evaluating the distance to fit a full disc onto my basler 1920-155um sensor.   No barlow required.  No reducer required.     For high res work I use my basler aca720-500um which does 500 frames per second on larger pixels.

Peter: , id love to see your quarter disk images without flats, eyepieces typically will not show the sweet spot because it is vignetted by the 5mm blocking filter.  When you upgrade to larger blocking filter's;  This becomes very apparent with imaging wide fields. 

Also note that running a 2x barlow, and  pushing the focal lengh through a binoview greatly alters your F/ratio beyond 2x.   Your magnification increases by 1.5x for every 50mm you extend past the optic.

Unfortunately You do still have a sweet spot, it is  vignetted by the 5mm blocking filter; the reality is you are only using 7mm of your 20mm etalon.   If you upgrade to a larger blocking filter - you will become immediately aware of this bottleneck.

We are all still limited by seeing despite how good our equipment is.

6 hours ago, Rusted said:

$600?  😱

a single piece of 90mm diameter fused silica custom optics cost is nearly $2000.00; and that is an unmounted product.  You can confirm this on your own time if you choose to find a supplier.

A_p_o_l_l_o has ebay fees, paypal fees, and shipping fees ;  The h-alpha optic is also mounted,    Nobody in the world can beat the price he has the auction listed at;  There was a business proposal with istar optical at the time of design but that never went through due to lack of interest in the solar market.  Everybody wants something for half the cost, or wants some cheaters short cut.    

Fortunately the  90mm optic is the cheater's shortcut.   Especially considering you have that istar optical halpha achromat and baader 160 d-erf..   Your current 20mm pst optic is the bottleneck limiting your system,

   The new optic opens the bottleneck that has plagued all pstmod's.

Also note that an unmounted 160mm baader planetarium d-erf filter was not a bargain item, ; $300.00 just to mount it from teleskope service.

But hey theres always the daystar quark gamble , or  a crazy expensive daystar quantum filter.

Good hardware is not cheap.

On 09/05/2020 at 00:23, Rusted said:

Interesting response. Thanks. Can you explain these "errors" please?

You are obviously doing something right to have obtained these very even images.
I have only just begun to use flats for my own PST etalon based 150mm/10 H-a imaging.
I swap regularly between a BF5 and a LUNT 12mm BF. Choosing the one which works best on the subject.
Though I use SharpCap, AS!3, ImPPG and PF7m, I have found flats rather "high maintenance" but beneficial.
Your own telescope build and processing experience might hold valuable information for us all.

Thanks again

you would have to purchase a 90mm x  -800mm hydrogen alpha collimator to replicate my process.  There is one listed on ebay, and coincidently these are specifically made for the f/10 istar optical h-alpha doublet's.

Unfortunately there is no other way with standard pst optics, however this is worth the investment.  Based on your tag, you already have all the required essentials to complete the "nirvana system".

what are your actual exposure , gain, and gamma settings?   If you are using alot of gain, this is where the noise is from.  If you are using 0 gamma(at least in fire capture), this is also going to cause the noise.

If your setup requires you to crank up the gain its entirely possible you need a different blocking filter that lets a bit more light through, almost everyone needs to crank up software settings to get prominences to be exposed; but there is an extent to where you will not see something on the live screen that still is completely visible in the actual recorded data.

Try experimenting with a capture; where the live view does not show anything then take a sneak peak at the recording.  I have been quite surprised by this myself, thinking that i did not capture the data because it was not visible on my monitor ; but then was delighted to see the recording actually did contain everything.  

The mindset of "having to see" with our eyes on the screen does not necessarily apply to what the camera actually captures.

Indeed it could still be "ccd bakeout" however, so i will not discredit the 43c temp idea.  

6 hours ago, David Smith said:

Took me a while to spot it but got there in the end! Good capture, I wonder what it is? appears not to be moving in a linear fashion but that could be an optical illusion. What equipment were you using?

 

127mm x 1200mm explore scientific achromat + coronado pst etalon + 5mm blocking filter + basler aca1920-155um camera.

this post is raw video, no editing (aside from converting to .gif)- captured at 160 frames per second.   

entry begins at about the 1'o;clock position and ends at 7 o'clock.  Not too sure what it is, but it had to be pretty far away to be transiting this long.  My guess is a large fly or butterfly, but maybe a stray balloon.  However Bugs usually do not "blink" the way this seems to be.  Perhaps a piece of mylar way up in the sky that  detached from a plane.

8 hours ago, Rusted said:

Good detail but now you need to try applying flats during capture to remove the artificial sunspots.

Its just a little dust I can blow off with the rocket bulb.  Flats never work for me in firecapture, and also cause a ton of errors in autostakkert and registax when i apply them.

It would be nice if microsoft or google would just build the software we need already, its not like astronomy is a new field.

I can adjust the disc size by moving my extension tubes, and note that these full discs are taken with a 1200mm ota out of a 5mm blocking filter; a  Very unique setup here.

The sweet spot of the pst etalon has been completely eliminated.

whats the richfield d/s unit? a Pressure tuner donorscope hack?

great capture,  you will have great fun with this.  (interesting to see you are using a mac)

127mm x 1200mm + pst etalon + 5mm blocking filter.

Good day!

.

Captured around 4pm on 4/19/2020-  1000 frames stacked per 4000 frame video,    223 frames.   ~8 seconds per 4000 frames captured.