Poor quality h-alpha capture of today's M1.2 flare at ~10.30UTC 2022 April 18th

[cathalferris]

Alright - I know full well the quality of this is not great, but good enough considering how it was taken. I saw this morning the notification of a flare underway on the phone, so I decided to go and take a quick visual look with the PST to see what's going on. After a few min of admiring the fast-paced changes and showing the flare to hersefl, I decided to try using the phone camera to take a pic. The capture I got is afocal, with the Samsung S10 held in the Celestron XYZ phone adapter above a 13mm Ethos eyepiece, through my slightly rusty-of-EDF secondhand PST. Exposure details: pro mode, (ƒ/1.5 1/125 4.32 mm ISO800), Curves applied quickly in paint.net for aesthetics.

I know full well the camera isn't perfectly on-axis or fully centered. Focus may not have been *perfect* either - and hard to get right with afocal autofocus phones, and seeing from the sunlit balcony is horrible it would appear.

For some reason the afocal is significantly harder to get right than e.g. proper focal plane with one of my CCDs, but I could see that the flare was dissipating and I had to do this setup in a hurry. Maybe I should keep this set up and ready in case of a decent flare this week, given there's a fair amount of sunshine forecast and there's a good chance of more flares. I promise, the next capture will be significantly better!. Still, I managed to capture an H-Alpha flare fairly clearly, so happy enough really.