The sun always looks nice when there's a large active region complete with spots and plage and todays sun fitted the bill. Taken with the ED60 at f12 this scope has noticeable more spherical aberration at 393nm than my other refractors, but with the Skywatcher AZ Gti mount makes for a very nice grab and go setup.
The sun was shining nicely in North Wales this morning, but being in the mountains makes for choppy seeing. I was trying out the portable rig - my Skywatcher AZ Gti mount, with the ED60 with a pair of double stacked Lunt 50 etalons on. It was difficult getting focus as i'd forgotten the sun shade for the laptop and the bright spring sunshine was blinding. However it was nice to be able to image AR12738 as it was squarely geo effective, maybe this will be the last big sunspot of cycle 24?
Visually saturdays prominences were great at the eyepiece on the Coronado SM90!
I got the opportunity on Saturday to test out a setup that i'd been wanting to use for a while with the FLIR GH3 ICX814 camera and the large chip it has. Using the 100mm Tal at 1000mm focal length allows me to still get the full disk on a single frame. The increased resolution of the 100mm means when the image is viewed full size both the spicule ring and also prominences are visible. There is a ghost image floating around in the bottom half of the frame that needs to be dealt with, but, on the whole i'm very pleased with this image.
I decided to try a shot of the departing active region in Sodium light. There was nothing to see apart from maybe 2 tiny pores. Taken with the 100mm Tal refractor and Sodium Quark along with the FLIR GH3 ICX 814 camera.
Prominences were the order of the day on Saturday; decaying AR12737 was approaching the limb, and apart from very small polar filaments the disk was essentially blank. All the action was on the limb though, with a number of prominences that visually were very impressive. Taken with a Lunt50 etalon on the Coronado SM90 and the FLIR GH3 ICX814 camera.
In a week this little active region started as an emerging flux region, developed into an active region with a number of small spots, and by now was decaying. This shot was taken as it approached the eastern limb with the SM90 double stacked with a daystar Quark. Seeing was far from ideal, and this image was by far the best of a number that was taken.
