White light Sun, 3rd April

[JamesF]

Had to nip out between conference calls this morning to get the subs for this one finishing with literally only seconds to spare, but it did give me something to work on during the call instead of playing buzzword bingo. I swear these people must get paid more than me because they can draw out to an hour-long meeting (and powerpoint slides) something that I would have felt merited no more than a single sentence. Anyhow, I was desperate to get out this morning because the forecast for this afternoon isn't convincing and whilst the seeing wasn't great it rarely seems to improve during the day so I had to take the chances I got.

120 frames of 1/1000th @ ISO100, 450D and 127 Mak, preprocessed in PIPP and stacked using Registax v6 with a cut-off at 96% quality. I'm starting to wonder if what I thought was a dust bunny isn't actually a feature as it seems to be maintaining its location relative to the large AR even though I know I didn't have the image in the same place on the sensor as yesterday.

James

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Lovely. That big AR is really fascinating. Very prominent in H-alpha as well

[JamesF]

Doh! And now I've linked to the wrong images. I knew I still wasn't properly well. I'll try to sort that out now.

James

[Montana]

Great image! the second smudge does look very similar in shape to the big spot, is it a processing error? or reflection of some kind?

Alexandra

[earth titan]

Brilliant. I need to start doing DSLR rather than webcam on solar, to aim for something as brilliant as this.

[JamesF]

It's certainly a lot of work to do a full disc with a webcam

I'd love to have a mono camera with something like a 20mm square sensor for full disc imaging, but I suspect that I wouldn't like the price at all

James

[Steve Ward]

Glad you found the time today James ,

Nowt for me despite the clear skies , done sommat to me back again and didn't fancy getting stuck on top of the pier . . .

[JamesF]

Not good news, Steve We seem to be dropping like flies at the moment. I'm actually feeling much better today, but still unbelievably tired. I've been half-contemplating getting a few hours sleep in before dinner so I can get out this evening.

No chance of getting anything using the other mount?

James

[cgarry]

A great image James, it is facinating seeing how it is developing since I imaged it at the weekend.

Glad for are feeing better. I was out attempting to image Saturn in the early hours of this morning but the seeing was so bad I just packed up and went back to bed. So you have not missed that much!

Cheers,

Chris

[Bizibilder]

Nice sharp image - you had much better seeing than I had today.

[JamesF]

Thank you both. I'm actually surprised the image came out as well as it did given the seeing, Roger. Normally I get a reasonably steady limb in live view and can see when the ARs are well focused even though there's some distortion in the atmosphere, but this morning the limb was rippling quite obviously and 10x zoom for focusing on the large AR was a complete non-starter. Even at 5x it was hard to be sure when there was a sharp image.

James

[Steve Ward]

Can hardly get out of the chair let alone hump the HEQ5Pro + Mak out there . . . .

Does grate somewhat after all the grey but there . . .