Activity levels on the suns disk are dropping off a bit compared to what we had a week ago, however there are still plenty of interesting features but none of these have magnetic fields suitable for producing solar flares. Image taken with the DS40 at 700mm focal length with the DMK31 camera.
I only managed to capture 30 frames, or roughly 5 minutes real time worth of data for this timelapse before the clouds rolled back in and hid things from me, but this shows just how turbulent and active our star actually is. It was by far the brightest thing on our star as this new sunspot emerged into view, where only a few hours earlier there was nothing. The shot has some hazy frames as high cloud and haze was interfering, but it doesn't detract too much. This was taken with the 100mm PST mod with 2x barlow to give 2000mm focal length with the DMK31 camera.
For some time now I have had my suspicions that the performance of my PST mod was being limited by the etalon not being truly collimated to the optical axis of the donor OTA, despite upgrading the focuser on the Tal100R to a nice Moonlite unit, when then is another focuser hanging off the back of this it does incur some flexure in the system. Not even noticeable if you were using the scope as intended, but in solar astronomy where the slightest tilt of an etalon affects it's performance this is crucial. I was getting some banding previously on images with this setup, which is usually a sign the etalon was being tilted too much (sag due to flexure), so I decided a radical approach was needed. I completely ditched the second focuser and just used extension tubes to get the camera chip the required 200mm behind the refocusing lens in the etalon assembly. As soon as I did this I could see a marked improvement in terms of an increase in detail and contrast, without the adverse effects of banding. By doing this has reduced the loading on the Moonlite on the Tal by some 80%. Now the next job is to work out the optimal rotational clocking of the etalon with the OTA, and then the same for the blocking filter with respect to the etalon. When all this is done it will be index marked to ensure quick repeatability.
Ever the optimist for bagging an animation of a decent sized flare going off, I trained the 100mm PST mod on ar12132, and using the autorun feature in firecapture ran off a roughly 8 minute timelapse exposure of it. Sadly, there was no flaring or much else happening, but it does show nicely the movement of plasma in and around this small part of our star.
After getting an overview of wednesdays sun with the little 40mm scope, I decided to use the 100mm PST mod to get in a little closer on some of the features. Here is a close up shot of ar12134, and while looks quite turbulent in this image is unlikely to throw off any flares in the days ahead.
A closeup of the suns eastern limb where the new sunspot could be seen forming, throwing of surging jets of plasma into space. There were some very high velocities involved here as tuning the scopes etalon which shows a doppler shifted view of the sun showed quite a change of appearance of this little region. Taken again with the DS40 at 925mm focal length with the DMK31 camera.
This double stacked view of all the activity on the suns western limb almost gives a 3D appearance with all the filaments and proms seemingly projecting outward off the disk. The image is a little soft as I was pushing then focal length of the little 40mm scope here to 925mm, rather oversampled for the DMK31 camera! Still, presented at this scale the image works quite well!
