Solar 12-09-21 With a Daystar SS60-DS and 150pds

[zcapp96]

These were taken between clouds and with never ending high haze, so not bad considering. Wanted to get a go at the big sunspot before it disappeared and the weather here has been rubbish! All taken with a ASI290mm and colourised in photoshop. Each was 5000 exposures and around the best 35% stacked. Yellow one was with a white light filter on a 150pds and the others through the Daystar SS60-DS. Happy with the results!

[Luke]

Very nice! Well done beating the high haze. Thin cloud was hampering my views at the eyepiece. I love the colours.

5000's a nice big lot of exposures. What kind of frame rate are you getting out of the ASI290?

The Daystar SS60-DS seems quite a good price. Are you very happy with it? Are there any minuses to it?

I don't think I'd buy one myself as I had a few issues with Daystar, but it looks an interesting unit and some folks are getting amazing results from Daystar equipment, especially for the price.

[Mark at Beaufort]

Very nice I particularly like the 2nd image - really well done.

[zcapp96]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

Very nice! Well done beating the high haze. Thin cloud was hampering my views at the eyepiece. I love the colours.

5000's a nice big lot of exposures. What kind of frame rate are you getting out of the ASI290?

The Daystar SS60-DS seems quite a good price. Are you very happy with it? Are there any minuses to it?

I don't think I'd buy one myself as I had a few issues with Daystar, but it looks an interesting unit and some folks are getting amazing results from Daystar equipment, especially for the price.

Thanks! The asi290 is a fantastic camera, it's so sensitive you can have very short exposures. I was getting 80-90fps for the full frame white light image and over 120fps for the large prominence picture, which I had limited to 800x600. I've had even higher than that on a 640x480 when doing captures of Mars and Jupiter. And that's on an old laptop that practically wind up!

The Daystar is a great value bit of kit that I don't think I've fully utilised the capabilities of yet. It can be fiddly to focus and the 10min warm up needs to be factored in (I use the white light on the 150pds while it's warming up). I'm very pleased with it, it's opened up an area of imaging that otherwise I wouldn't be able to do as I couldn't afford a Lunt! 

[Luke]

Thanks for the info and thoughts! That's interesting you got those fast rates on an old lappy! My lappy's newish but with old components and only cost £200. But I wondered what it might be able to do should I get tempted back into imaging, as it does have USB3 and I added an SSD. Have fun with the SS60-DS!

[Pete Presland]

A nice last capture of that active region, shame to see it disappear, all quite again now unfortunately.

[zcapp96]

On 17/09/2021 at 10:09, Pete Presland said:

A nice last capture of that active region, shame to see it disappear, all quite again now unfortunately.

Indeed, I had been watching it cross the face of the sun on space weather while there was no break in the clouds for days, didn't think I'd get a chance to see it myself but just caught the end of it!