First try white light solar

[zhgutas]

Something weird happened yesterday,and the sky was absolutely clear in midday, with only a slight breeze So I went up on the roof to have my best-so-far sun viewing session with ST80 (baader solar film on an aperture mask, so effectively ST40 ). I was amazed the detail I could see with such a modest aperture and magnification (using ED8 eyepiece). I could even see the brighter faculae here and there, surrounded by darker areas . and all this with my trusty ST80 and a tiny piece of "tinfoil"? wow.

today wasn't so good, as thin cloud was covering the entire sky and the wind was blowing like you wouldn't believe, especially on the roof of 16-store building. My Velbon sherpa tripod was shaking all over the place, but I couldn't resist trying catching few shots of our Sun.

so here is my first try :

Nikon D70 2x SW barlowed on ST80, some 8-10 shots stacked in Registax and processed in CS2.

Not perfect, by any means, but I am well chuffed, considering my experience (zilch!) and the equipment used.

Thanks for looking.

(Larger Image here)

Marius

[armicheal]

Wow, that's a cool one. You certainly caught it at the right time. You can see alot of granules on the surface and plenty of spot detail.

[zhgutas]

Thanks armicheal.

wish it wasn't so hard to get a focus on dslr, it was literally trial and error, and I've spent like 4/5 of a time trying to get it right. i guess liveview would've helped here a lot

[armicheal]

I do some DSLR shooting from time to time and was having issues too at first. It would seem that one or two shots would be crispy and the rest would be blurry. I did 3 main things to fix this. First I got a 90 degree viewfinder for my DSLR. You can find these on ebay for around $40. It does 2 things for you, first it allows you to look down on the camera instead of inback of it. You can also rotate the viewfinder to be more comfortable. It clips onto the back of your current viewfinder. It should have a 1.25x to 2x zoom switch on it also. So it will allow you to get 2x closer to the image than normal which helps with focus. The next thing I did to stabilize the shots was to get a remote shutter cable. This isolated the whole setup from me pushing the fire button. The last thing I did was to stagger the shots. For my camera the shutter really shakes the whole setups so waiting between each shot a couple seconds provides it time to stabilize. Clear Skyz,

[zhgutas]

unfortunately there is no cable for D70 :? only IR, which isn't convenient for astro at all!

I'm hoping to soon get my hands on a D5000, so we'll see how that goes