Solar scope joins the team!

[ollypenrice]

I've decided to add a Lunt 60mm solarscope to the little team of optical toys with which we entertain ourselves down here...

Thanks to those who advised on the various pros and cons of the choice of instrument. I'm hoping it will be here some time in December.

I'd like to do a bit of outreach work with it as well since the middle of the night is a poor time to catch the passing public! I had a wonderful time the day of the Venus transit with nearly ninety people having a look outside our local tourist office.

Now I need to find out about webcam-type imaging. Probably a DMK, yes?

Olly

[Tim]

DMK21 suits the Lunt 60 very well Olly

If you get a good one (L 60) the detail can be amazing, I have spent a lot of time with solar observers with various setups ranging from PST 40 to double stacked 90mm with binoviewers, and the Lunt (Stephen Greens) was easily able to hold its own amongst the company, very pleasing indeed.

[russ]

Can only imagine that will be a terrific scope to use. We used a Solarscope SV60 at Salisbury SP and the views were jaw dropping. I'm sure your visitors will love it.

[Merlin66]

Olly,

Glad you decided to go solar.....

All you need now is a spectroscope to complete the line-up:)

[brianb]

DMK21 suits the Lunt 60 very well

Yes but the DMK31 would be better ... much larger area. I use both 21 (for closeups; high frame rate useful) and 41 (for small scale / full disc) unfortunately the focal length of the Lunt 60 is just greater than will allow the full disc to fit onto the chip of the 41. The 31 is a good compromise. Whatever you do get the mono version!

[davew]

Run it by me again. When do you sleep ?

Dave

[brianb]

When do you sleep ?

Plenty of time to sleep when it's cloudy. About 210 hours so far this month.

In the absence of cloud, from about 1 hour before sunrise to 2 hours after sunrise and from 2 hours before sunset to 1 hour after sunset can be used for sleeping - too bright for night time objects, sun too low for solar.

[davew]

Oops, sorry Brian. That was meant for Olly.

I know you get plenty of cloud. About one hour before me usually.

Clear tonight though.

Dave.

[ollypenrice]

Actually, Dave, you have a point and I have had to think about it! I won't be able to go full tilt at the solar imaging on days when we might have collected over 12 hours' worth of DS data the night before (that's with two setups running.) I generally rely on the moon to catch up on sleep.

Thanks for the camera advice, Brian. How big a disadvantage would the 31 have as compared with the 21 on the planets? I feel I ought to make a bit more effort on those, too.

Olly

[brianb]

How big a disadvantage would the 31 have as compared with the 21 on the planets?

You get half as many frames .... and bigger AVI files to process, unless you can be bothered setting a region of interest.

For Mars the slower frame rate isn't too much of an issue, but for Jupiter you really do need a high frame rate to capture lots of frames in the short window dictated by the rapid rotation of the planet.

[ollypenrice]

Tough choice then. I really would quite like to do some planetary as well.

I saw an Ha solar disk taken with a deep sky CCD camera recently and that didn't look too bad so I might start there. Very exciting!

Olly

[brianb]

Tough choice then.

FWIW the ISS solar transit I posted yesterday was taken with my DMK41 ... I wanted the extra area because I wasn't too sure which part of the solar disk the transit would occur on. And when I say "single raw frame" I mean I cropped the image but applied no contrast correction, no sharpening, no resizing - that's what raw Ha images look like, when the sun is low, there's a trace of high cloud and the seeing is none too good.