Solar wedges 1.25" vs 2"

[spaceboy]

1 hour ago, Moonshane said:

I am intrigued as to what people consider high power views in solar?

 

A good point Shane. I never gave it much thought before you mentioned it but I guess with WL/Ha scopes often only ranging from only 35mm to 150mm it would be interesting to see what solar observers consider a high magnification.

I suppose a lot has to do with where you live also as a hot summers day beating down on a grassy field isn't going to have the same disruptive effect on the local atmosphere as it is cooking tarmac and concrete.

I have found my lunt60 often sits good at x40-x50 with better days allowing for x125

The PST mod averages x55-x66 with pockets of good seeing allowing up to x125 ..... although I often only have to hand the Baader 8-24 zoom so not sure how far I could push it.

The Lunt wedge and ST120 happily sits at x50-120 with steady days allowing for x200+. I'm yet to try the wedge with the ED120 so my guess I could possibly get higher WL magnifications.

My attempts using the wedge and EVO150 yielded little improvements over the ST120 and the hassle of setting up a large scope in between clouds outweighed the benefits IMO. I do though believe a 2" wedge would have been better suited to the 6" EVO.

The five or six times I used my 200p with full aperture mask again was not overly impressive only allowing for x50 or so. Plenty of resolution just didn't allow me to use enough magnification to benefit from it.

[xtreemchaos]

i think id like to own the badder cool- c, must start hinting to kids , must hint i want the imaging one , it worked last year i hinted i needed i mean medic-ley needed some 25x100 binos for my bithday. . charl.

[DRT]

The Sun is out ?  Hurrah!!!

I've just spent half an hour with the EVO150 F8 switching between the Baader 2" and Lunt 1.25" wedges using my 15mm and 32mm TV Plossls. Both setups have Baader Solar Continuum and Single Polarising filters so this is about as fair a test as my box of tricks could provide. 

I'll start by saying that any difference between the two wedges under this test was marginal. 

At the higher mag (80x) I could see no real difference when viewing the sunspot and the activity surrounding it but when looking across the surface of the disk the Baader seemed to show a little more graining than the Lunt. 

At the lower power (37.5x) the Baader was a clear winner with lots of varying detail across the entire disk. Both showed the sunspot region very clearly. 

My conclusion is that I'm glad I have both. The Baader allows me to use my best EPs and gives marginally better surface detail and the Lunt is extremely portable and still performs excellently. 

Draw from that what you will ?

 

PS: I tried 11mm and 8mm EPs on the sunspot: the first was wobbly, the second just showed a black smudge. 

[Stu]

8 hours ago, Stu said:

also a GPC which is either x1.25 or x1.7

Just verified that this is a x1.7 GPC. My rough calculations say:

25mm/1.7 =14.7

14.7/4 = 3.675

740mm Scope focal length / 3.675mm Effective eyepiece focal length = x201 mag

It possibly works out higher than this including the length of the binoviewers into the barlow calculation so I would say last year I was using between x100 and x200 for white light solar, possibly higher but this year I have mainly used x100 or sometimes x50 due to the apparently poorer seeing.

[Moonshane]

cheers Stu

I think this supports what I have managed since getting the wedge. Hopefully the coming months will be kinder. I agree with Nick though that where I am with stone flags and rooftops all around me I might need to go somewhere greener to get higher mags. Maybe as well as dark sites for night time, we need green sites for daytime

[Stu]

4 minutes ago, Moonshane said:

cheers Stu

I think this supports what I have managed since getting the wedge. Hopefully the coming months will be kinder. I agree with Nick though that where I am with stone flags and rooftops all around me I might need to go somewhere greener to get higher mags. Maybe as well as dark sites for night time, we need green sites for daytime

You may well be right there Shane, although I'm surrounded by houses I observe on grass so that may not be so bad in daytime.

[Moonshane]

Having said all of that, when sketching I seem to be able to extract pretty good detail at 100x so maybe it's a non-issue. I would like to take advantage of bettier seeing to observe granulation in more detail though. I suppose even with a solar minimum, the granulation is always there

[Stu]

42 minutes ago, Moonshane said:

I suppose even with a solar minimum, the granulation is always there

That's what I love about WL, even when there is apparently nothing going on, there is always some fine detail to pick out; granulation, some faculae or a tiny pore or two.

[spaceboy]

17 hours ago, Moonshane said:

cheers Stu

I think this supports what I have managed since getting the wedge. Hopefully the coming months will be kinder. I agree with Nick though that where I am with stone flags and rooftops all around me I might need to go somewhere greener to get higher mags. Maybe as well as dark sites for night time, we need green sites for daytime

[spaceboy]

My phone really don't like SGL interface.

I've been meaning to ask you Shane, how did you find sglx for solar observing? I found every solar scope I looked through that weekend that people were achieving high magnification. I put it down to seeing at the time then wondered if it may have just been down to the location as when observing the solar eclipse at a huge car park near some BT exchange thing everyone seemed to be using average magnifications. This though could just have been for convenience to allow everyone at the event to use eyepieces with no concern of staying on target or struggle with eye relief ???? Did you notice this Stu as I remembered you attended the event also.

[Stu]

23 minutes ago, spaceboy said:

My phone really don't like SGL interface.

I've been meaning to ask you Shane, how did you find sglx for solar observing? I found every solar scope I looked through that weekend that people were achieving high magnification. I put it down to seeing at the time then wondered if it may have just been down to the location as when observing the solar eclipse at a huge car park near some BT exchange thing everyone seemed to be using average magnifications. This though could just have been for convenience to allow everyone at the event to use eyepieces with no concern of staying on target or struggle with eye relief ???? Did you notice this Stu as I remembered you attended the event also.

I can't remember specifically but seem to think I had some good views through both the Quark and I think a Lunt Herschel Wedge which I had at the time. Through the Quark I did have some cracking views of prominences being eclipsed.

Perhaps people at the event just wanted to take in the whole disc and get a sense of scale and context rather that using high power to focus on a small part of it?

Looking at the pics I took through the eyepiece, I was mainly getting full disk, I now recall watching an AR being eclipse too.

Looking at the setup I had there, it looks like I was getting around x63 in the Quark (32mm Plossl plus a 0.8 focal reducer), and between x38 and x77 with the Leica Zoom in the 106mm triplet. I only seem to have started using much higher powers since having the Tak, CoolCeramic and Binoviewer combination. The BV certainly helps reduce floaters and makes observing more comfortable.

I have fabulous memories of that weekend. Four clear nights with a 16" Sumerian trawling galaxies with the dob mob until I couldn't take any more (!) and the whole eclipse event too, great stuff!

Apologies for the thread diversion!!

[spaceboy]

Yep best star party I've been to. All went perfectly apart from the dew on the final night cutting my night short to then find the car had a flat battery so we couldn't set off home. Sure made me understand how unsympathetic and anal imagers can be at the thought I might request the AA out to give a jump start so we could go. Anyone would think AA hazard beacons were fireballs from hell to hear them speak. I wouldn't mind but I was dazzled several times by dog walkers coming past. Lesson learned and all that.

In the end my boy was glad I didn't want to upset anyone and decided to stay till the morning. I think that was more because he knew he wouldn't have to go to school :D. 

[Peter Drew]

A member brought in a 1.25" fit Lacerta HW today so I've had a chance to try one. First thing, it's huge!, it dwarfs my Lunt version. If Lacerta do a 2" version I'm sure they will use the same body. Heavy as well, by the time you add a substantial eyepiece or even a binoviewer you are going to need a good focuser. The build quality is exellent with chunky components in aluminium and it's possible to equip it with add on adaptors similar to the Baader T2 diagonals. I compared it to my Lunt model and could see no difference in performance using the 220mm refractor with fitted ERF at 112X. The back of the Lunt got too hot to touch whereas the heavily ribbed back of the Lacerta was just warm. Had the Lacerta been available at the time I think I would have bought it instead, happy with either though.  

[John]

I've been using my Lunt 1.25" HW with my ED120 lately at it seems to do just fine. We had excellent views of the recent complex of sunspots at my astro club meeting a week or so ago using this rig. At 129x (Pentax XW 7mm) the structure of the sunspots and other surface texture features was quite impressive