Ha Full Disk 15th February

Surprisingly the sun came out briefly around lunchtime today and I got chance to test out my new Skywatcher Solarquest mount, which, I have to say is very good indeed and comes recommended. Conditions weren't great with the scudding clouds but the mount coped admirably, and also surprisingly the image of the sun came out OK considering the background of haze. Taken with my Lunt 50 etalon on the 60mm f6 scope double stacked with a Daystar Quark. There wasn't a lot to see on the sun but the filaments trace out the magnetic fields of cycle 25. Fingers crossed for more clear skies and also more activity on the sun soon!

Ha Full Disk 6th February

After a couple of weeks of what seems like never ending cloud and grey the sky turned blue late this afternoon to reveal old yellow face. I was messing around with some different potential combinations rather than doing 'serious' imaging. Good job really - the sun is blank! There were a couple of really small filaments on the disk and pretty much no other activity. The proms were the best thing and even these were small scale. Taken with a Lunt50 etalon on the ED80/600 and using the APM 1.6x telecentric to give f19 at the quark etalon. Visually this works well, however imaging wise I was struggling with the lack of surface detail. It's all about experimenting!

Calcium Swathe 23rd January

I tried out my new 127/1200 refractor yesterday for a bit of calcium, I thought stopping down to 60mm would be fine, but the seeing really was that bad, realistically I should have stuck to 40mm. My plan is to have range of scopes that will be stopped accordingly to match the sampling of the pixel size of the camera used, with the size of the scope matching what the seeing allows. I plan to use this scope and camera combination at 72mm which will give me f16 at the filter. I had to do a lot of psot processing to salvage this image, normally my calcium images are minimally processed. Even with dodging snow showers to image it is worth it!

AR12797 & AR12798 in Ha 23rd January

Difficult to observe in the snow with passing snow showers, but I wanted to get out and take a look. Using the SM90 I struggled to get evenly on band without my laptop screen and this was my best effort. The filaments closer to the limb highlight the solar jet stream of magnetic activity associated with cycle 25.

CaK Full Disk 22nd January

The weather went from total clear skies to cloudy unexpectedly today over about 20 minutes. Fortunately I was able to grab a quick Cak disk with the 60mm f16 setup before the clouds sealed the sky. Its nice to see the sun getting steadily higher in the sky and also the new active region that has formed in the northern hemisphere over the past 24 hours. Something is also about to round in the northern hemisphere over the eastern limb. Looks like theres things to look at in the days ahead if the weather obliges, fingers crossed!

AR12796 in Ha - 16th January

There was just enough time to run off just over 1000 frames for this image before the cloud rolled in. I did manage to get the filter tuned properly, but wasn't enough time to get rid of the dust bunnies off the chip. The new active region looks nice as do the filaments.

Ha Full Disk 16th JAnuary

The sun came out briefly, very briefly, on Saturday lunchtime. I managed a full disk but didn't get time to tune it properly. Nice to get an overview though!