Sun 11th February 2011 - Start of This Years Solar Season!

Well folks, as you can see it's been a while since I last made a post here. Infact I only managed a couple of solar observations in october, then it's been all the way through to february before I was able to view / image the sun - an unfortunate side effect of living in a built up area, my southern horizon is populated by rooftops and trees, hiding the sun from my garden in the winter months. Fortunately the sun is climbing higher and higher in the sky now as spring approaches, and as such I should be able to get more solar observing in. Certainly for now, imaging is restricted to weekends, however if I can get home from work quickly I have a opportunity for visual observation just before sunset as my western horizon is quite low.


Since last year I have had some equipment changes and additions. You can see from my previous posts the objective lens in my Coronado SM40 scope was suffering from astigmatism, which manifested itself in my images in a diagonal cross hatching pattern. This is very annoying given that the coronado scope was bought for ~£1400, I don't think i'm being unreasonable in expecting better quality given the price. However reading around it seems this is something that has been seen in other Coronado scopes. Anyway, I decided the way forward with this dilemma was to mount the etalons on another OTA. After much deliberation I finally settled on a 70mm f6 refractor, as with the cameras I had would still allow full disk imaging. I machined an adapter to fix the etalons to the tube and was ready for the sun! In addition I also purchased a Lunt Solar Wedge for whitelight observations, using my 5" refractor I am optimistic of being able to do some high resolution close up images of sunspots as we get nearer to solar maximum. I plan to write an article in the equipment section of this blog detailing all of this more.

Fast forward to today... I was only able to get a few images today due to various reasons; we had a plumber coming round to do some work, neighbours stopping by to chat as I tried to image and also intermittent fast moving cumulus cloud scudding along my southern horizon. Regardless though I persevered on and imaged away.


I attempted a 'near full disk' shot using the DS40 and DMK31 camera at f10.5, I intially thought there wasn't a huge amount to see, but after processing the image there's actually alot going on! This can be seen below...




There's something rounding the limb that was 'spitting out' plasma in the image above, so decided to zoom in to see what was goin g on. However by the time I did the activity had died down considerably, despite the images not being many minutes apart. This was taken at f19 with DS40 and DMK31...




Next I was keen to try out my new Lunt Solar Wedge. I had always struggled to image granulation with Baader film, however visually with the wedge it was really easy to see. Concentrating on Active Region 1158 I used a solar continuum filter in conjunction with the wedge and imaged at f19 using the DMK31. I was pretty pleased with the results given this is my first go with this setup, the poor seeing conditions and also the low altitude of the sun...



I'm pleased with todays results - it marks the start of the solar season for me! 9 months of observations and imaging ahead of me. With solar activity starting to ramp up this year promised to be an exciting year. Hopefully i'll be buying somemore solar equipment in the months ahead aswell.


Thanks for reading and hope you like the pics!