AR2740 & Limb | HA | May 5th 2019

[MalVeauX]

Good morning all,

I'm off a few days, so I just knew the weather would be awful. To my surprise yesterday I had some sky time. This morning, the storms are here. There's lots of clouds and raining here and there. A big lightning storm just rolled through. I set up regardless and cracked the top of my observatory, a little tenacious defiance against the odds, that I might get a sucker hole at the very least. I was only out from 9am to 9:30am because it was just too nasty. Literally raining. But sometimes a tiny sucker hole passes through, with just enough transparency to get something. It was enough for me to at least focus briefly, but not critically. I didn't even have time for flat calibration. I captured a single 500 frame sequence over and over as the clouds passed, and sometimes I had to close the top of my observatory for drizzling rain. For the briefest 3 seconds, I managed to capture some data. I figured it was rubbish because there's clouds passing through the sequence. But, I tried anyways. Registax couldn't stack it. AS!3 stacked it though! I processed out the gradients & rings and ended up with a workable piece of 3 seconds of stacked data. Lovely prominence this morning near AR2740! I had no other time of course, and the rain then came. So this is all I was able to do. A single image from a single 3 second sequence of capture of 500 frames. I closed up and ran into my house at this point. It's now 10am and my electricity is flickering on/off and it's raging raining and with a bad lightning storm over head.

80mm F5 Refractor + Baader 2" UV/IR Block Filter + Quark Chromosphere (F21) + IMX174

Very best,

[Altocumulus]

Not bad from a short session.

 

You're braver than I - I got a few drops of rain on my scope lens and it took me a while to clean them after it dried dirty!

[Davey-T]

Well done, had a similar day here yesterday and I chickened out 

Dave

[Pete Presland]

Excellent images as always, looks like the weather here.