DIY fire starter!

[Rusted]

On the dangers of solar imaging:

There I am, Sunday morning, in my observatory, capturing videos of the sun in H-alpha.
When I start smelling burning.  I immediately thought my wife had lit the woodburning stove.
Very unlikely, because have had already run out of furniture to burn last winter.
There not much left over for logs when there is astro equipment to buy!

Now the burning smell was becoming progressively worse!
Not a good time as I'm busy processing videos in Registax! Go away nasty burning smell! Be gone!

Finally, I glanced up and the dome was full of sunlit smoke! Is the laptop on fire?
No, the smoke is coming from the dewshield of the 6" refractor.
It's smoking like a chimney and now I'm coughing and choking!

The culprit was a cardboard stop ring I had fitted in the dewshield on my last imaging session in thick cloud.
The internal filter had reflected the sun's heat back out in a beam and set fire to the cardboard!
I grabbed the burning ring and dropped it into a rainwater collection bucket on the floor of the dome.
Fortunately the 6" objective had survived the conflagration and I could continue with my imaging and processing.

Let's be careful out there people!

 

[Gina]

Glad there was no damage.

[Rusted]

Thank you Gina!

A while later it absolutely tipped down!
Given sufficient foresight I could have extinguished the fire!
So really it was just a case of bad timing!

[Davey-T]

Easily done, I've put the Quark in a couple of times and melted the plastic cap on the front, lucky these things smell of burning really 😂

Dave

[pete_l]

Sounds like a smoke detector would be a helpful addition for those intending to do remote solar imaging. As would a firefighting team on standby!

[Dr_Ju_ju]

I'm in a field in Galloway, @ the star party, & trying to use the Sun as a focusing aid (the farthest thing away before the 'real' stars), but it's a case of running backwards and forwards dodging the rain showers.....