The most frustrating afternoon

[Nigella Bryant]

Hi all, just had to get this off my chest. I've had the most frustrating start to my solar imaging session I've ever had. It all started with the solarquest mount which wouldn't lock on to any GPS satellites. Took half an hour with switching on and off. Usually takes about a minute. Next after tuning the ha scope find I've several dark dust bunnies on the cmos chip. Took me another half hour to finally clean off all of them. That's what I get having to switch camera's from the ha scope to the baader k line scope. Me thinks another camera needs ordering. Usually I keep the camera on the ha scope and never take it off. That way it's never caused a problem untill I got the second scope for K-Line imaging. Finally after messing around for over an hour I got imaging. How frustrating this hobby can be.

I'm usually up and running in ten minutes. Good job there was plenty of clear sky this afternoon and didn't have to chase gap's in the cloud. Hopefully the data I've collected will be good. There were two sunspot groups, one with a single spot and another with three. Several small filaments and a few small prominences and a fairly big one. Three plage area's too. 

Hope it remains clear tonight for all of you night time observers/imagers.

Edited February 22, 2021 by Nigella Bryant
Added more comment

[aderyn]

Frustrating, no other word for it. Hope you have some good results in the end, though.

I've been admiring the clear blue skies here all day, and even beginning to tentatively think about the possibility (whisper it) of getting a scope out tonight. No longer. Cloud sweeping in,  thickening rapidly and the daytime moon has now disappeared. It's enough to make me contemplate solar observing😁 as the daytime skies do seem to be more consistently clear than the night time at the moment. The next couple of days don't look good for anything though, at least on this side of the country.

[Nigella Bryant]

2 minutes ago, aderyn said:

Frustrating, no other word for it. Hope you have some good results in the end, though.

I've been admiring the clear blue skies here all day, and even beginning to tentatively think about the possibility (whisper it) of getting a scope out tonight. No longer. Cloud sweeping in,  thickening rapidly and the daytime moon has now disappeared. It's enough to make me contemplate solar observing😁 as the daytime skies do seem to be more consistently clear than the night time at the moment. The next couple of days don't look good for anything though, at least on this side of the country.

Thanks, I do seem to have more clear sky during the day than at night or it just might be that I'm aware being up and about during daylight whereas at night I may look out and if it's cloudy I'll go to the land of nod and not be aware of any clear spells later. 

Solar imaging/observing is very worthwhile and dynamic, always changing, I love it, perhaps because I don't have to stay up late, lol. So frustrations aside whatever we observe/image it's worth it in the end.