Tuesday 4 June 2013

CaK full disk 2nd june

CaK full disk by Mark Townley
CaK full disk, a photo by Mark Townley on Flickr.

For sometime now I have been looking to have a 'portable' scope that go on a camera tripod and produce views in 3 wavelengths. I already own a Coronado SM40 scope, however have not really used it as the objective lens displayed quite strong astigmatism, however recently i was able to replace the objective lens, and fortunately the new one is optically as would be expected. I decided to try this scope (by removing the etalons!) with my CaK filters and Baader Solar Continuum filters, this give a near full disk view at the native 40mm aperture 400mm focal length with the DMK31 camera. This setup also works with the focal reducer to give smaller image scale if the setup is not mounted on a tracking mount, or for instance if there is a large prominence lift off that needs to be captured. The 3 full disk images below were all captured with this setup, and for the image scale presented here works really well. Now I just need to get a small portable tracking mount!