This angry little active region has been crackling with a number of smaller spots between the main bipolar group with many lines of swirling plasma molded by magnetic field lines. Taken with the 0.2m Airylab HaT at 7m focal length using the double stacked Daystar Quark and PGR Chameleon 3 camera.
This region is typical of the sort of small scale features on a quiet sun that can be seen with the 8" Airylab HaT; with a regular size scope there would be little to see, but at nearly 7m focal length there is quite a bit. The seeing was starting to go here, but this just about works.
This filament looked particularly dark on sundays sun, and I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the final image the subtle detail that had been recorded. The seeing must have been behaving at that point! Taken with the 100mm Tal100R, Double stacked Quark running at f43, and a Baader 0.7x solar telecompressor to bring the focal length back to a more usable 3 metres. The camera was the PGR Chameleon 3 using 2x2 binning to get a shorter exposure and larger pixels more suited to the focal length.
The 100mm Tal100R was putting on a good show with sundays solar activity as the heat of the day became too much for the seeing for the Airylab HaT, and with the wider field of view and lower resolution the resultant images were still nice and sharp. There was lots to see, and with an f43 beam entering the double stacked daystar quark the contrast was high. A nice set of images that I am pleased with!
With temperatures up at 28c when I took this picture, the 40mm scope was all I was going to be able to use in the midday heat with the seeing conditions boiling away. Fortunately this scope is impervious to all but the worst the atmosphere can throw at it, and, as a result I got a nice disk - 3 days in a row - surely a UK record 😆 Either way, at 500mm focal length and with the home brew CaK filter together with the PGR Chameleon 3 camera I got a nice full disk I thought!
This is only quite a small region on the sun, 'merely' a dozen or so Earths across, but with the 0.2m Airylab HaT at nearly 9 metres focal length it is possible to get up close and personal with this tempest of plasma. The image was taken shortly after 6am before the heat of the day destroyed the seeing conditions. The sun looks angry and menacing at this scale. The double stacked Daystar Quark was used along with the PGR Chameleon 3 with 2x2 binning to give nice large 6.9um pixels, 3 ms exposure time and a 120fps frame rate in an attempt to get the best out of the seeing conditions.
These 2 shots were both taken with the Airylab Hat, double stacked Quark, and PGR Chameleon 3 with 2x2 binning, the only difference being the wider field view used the Baader 0.7x solar telecompressor to give an effective focal length of just over 6 metres compared to the native focal length of nearly 9 metres using the quarks 4.3x telecentric instead of the Airlylab 2.7x telecentric. The seeing wasn't perfect at this scale but it was good enough to get a couple of acceptable images.
