Well I though my previous blog entry would have been the last of the season: here in downtown Brierley Hills my southern horizon looks uphill so is falsely elavated, there is however a window of about an hour that I have when the sun passes in a gap between 2 houses. Fortunately for me I was able to capitalise on this and despite some high cloud and very poor seeing I was reasonably pleased with the result.
There is lots to see on the sun today - the filaments are numerous and are almost knotted together. The northern hemisphere is definitely the most active with several active regions. However purely by chance I managed to capture the brightening of a small flare on the south eastern limb.
The shot was taken as a 6 pane mosaic, with the DS40 @ f21 with DMK31 camera. The scope is soon to be further modified with the removal of the stock Coronado ERF and replacement with a Baader 7nm Ha filter. this will significantly reduce thermal load on the blocking filter, and with a higher transmission and tighter bandpass should should an improvement in contrast on what is currently seen. This is my christmas project and I look forward to testing it out and getting some results. I think there is still a bit more that can be squeezed out of the the DS40.
