AR12824 Ha - 22nd May

Following a great start to spring weather wise, May as a month has not been great for solar imaging, with temperatures below average and plenty of cloud and rain. Gaps have been few and far between or generally when i've been at work. Satruday offered brighter skies, never completely clear, but transient brief blue patches, which is considerably better than the past few weeks gave. I started off with some visual work with the Coronado DS90 and a 18mm Cemax eyepiece which gives a nice full disk scale at 44x magnification. There was lots of pencil thin detail etched around the main active region, along with tenuous filaments and some small proms. After a band of showers passed through I switched to the 2x cemax barlow and the ZWO290mm camera for a close up view. Seeing was up and down in between the cloud gaps, and this is as sharp a view as I got. Later on there was some small scale C-class flaring which was interesting to view through the eyepiece. Just hoping some better weather arrives soon!

Ha Shots 7th May

My first decent shots first thing in the morning this season. I have my pier set up on the eastern side of the house with the Solarquest mount on which is idea for shots with the travelling kit. In this case this was with the Lunt 50mm etalon double stacked with a Daystar Quark and a FLIR IMX174 camera.

Jet Transit! 2nd May

The sun may have been pretty quiet on sunday, but I was pleasantly surprised to catch this Bombardier Global 5000 transiting the sun at a speed of 464 knots at an altitude of 24000 feet, been a while since I got a transit so pleased with this one!

Single Stack Double Stack Comparison 2nd May

The top image was taken with the Lunt 50 etalon, a 2x cemax barlow and the ZWO 290mm camera. The bottom image was takem with a Lunt50 etalon double stacked with a DAystar Quark and using the FLIR IMX174 camera. The difference in contrast on the filament is really quite obvious. I do use single stack some times, but the vast majotity of the time it is double stack all the way for me!

Departing Active Regions in Ha 2nd May

Taken with a Lunt50 etalon, double stacked with a DAystar Quark and using the FLIR IMX174 camera, this image shows the turbulent plasma of the chromosphere as these active regions slowly turn away from us.

Pores in Cak 2nd May

This was all the activity I coudl find on the second of may, a couple of pores (just off centre in this image). Taken with the ED80 at 60mm f28 using the homebrew CaK filter and the ZWo290mm camera. At this scale the camera is oversampling quite considerably, but produces really quite nice results, when the seeing allows this setup on larger apertures should reveal considerably more detail...

Departing Activity in CaK - 2nd May

Using the ED80 stopped down to 60mm and f28, using the ZWO 290mm camera for this closeup of the activity that has been on the face of the sun for the past 10 days or so. All that remains is disturbances in the chromosphere at this shallow angle.

CaK Full Disk 2nd May

The sun is going back to sleep again, and was presenting quite a blank disk in calcium light. Still nice to see old yellow (blue?) face again!