Wednesday 27 August 2014

AR12146 In Whitelight 27th August

This active region was putting on a great view as it approached the limb displaying lovely faculae.  I tried something a bit different here today and it worked:  Imaging at 3600mm focal length is not something I can do very often at all, and when I initially tried the image was very blurry on the laptop screen.  So I decided to change the sampling rate of the camera by using 2x2 binning, this has the effect of doubling the effective pixel size, doubling the sensitivity of the chip (reducing exposure), but importantly allowing me to be able to image at this much longer focal length and still get a decent image.  This was taken with the 100mm Tal refractor at 3600mm focal length with the DMK31 camera and the Lunt solar wedge with Baader solar continuum filter.