The sun in WL, CaK & Ha 23/04/22 - My first images since Sept 2018

[DrRobin]

I have been a little lapse lately, my first solar imaging session since Sept 2018, can you believe it?

So I dusted everything off on Sat morning and I really do mean dust, then my laptop had lost the camera driver, my phone refused to stay connected to the mount when fiddling with the manual adjustment, then the camera would only capture at 15fps until I rebooted and loaded the driver for a third time, then my PC ran out of hard disk space, several times.  My Quark was reluctant to stabilise and to cap it all I couldn't remember what combination of focal reducers, barlows or extension tubes to use to get a decent sized image and focus.  It was gone mid-day by the time I got these and think the seeing had gone downhill, the Ha was in and out of focus all of the time on the screen.

 

Somewhat amazing I managed to get anything, I just ran out of time to get any more Ha (for a mosaic), still no bad thing as I can't remember the settings I used for processing and it has taken my until Monday to process these three images.  Imagine if I was doing a 12 pane mosaic, like the good old days.

 

Sun in White Light, Zenithstar 80mm, Lunt wedge, AS174MM

Sun in Calcium K, Zenithstar 80mm, Lunt K-line filter, ASI174MM

Sun in Ha, Zenithstar 80mm, Daystar Quark, ASI174mm

All things considered I am pretty pleased with the results, now to clean my camera as there are dust spots on it, then find the right combination of focal reducers/barlows before the next session, which will hopefully be sooner than another 3.5 years.

 

Robin

[Kon]

Nice images but the last one has so much details!

[Pete Presland]

WOW, can not believe it has been that long Robin!  Good to see you have not lost your touch, despite the issues 🙂 

[David Smith]

Good to see you back Robin. Some nice images.