Images of the Sun, our local star, at a range of wavelengths with specialist solar telescopes. Imaging tutorials, solar bits and pieces for sale, talks and outreach with the Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project CBSAP.
Given the poor conditions with boiling seeing I decided to try a new configuaration to try and get some results from the day in Ha. Using the ED80 stopped down to 60mm to give me f10, I used the Airylab 2.8x telecentric to give an overall f28 at the Quark and the IMX174 camera. I ended up having capture 4000 frame runs to get some usable data, but on the whole these have worked and gives me a small aperture setup to use when the seeing conditions just aren't working for the larger apertures.
Even with the 50mm DS setup I was fighting the poor seeing conditions in the late afternoon sunshine, I had hoped to use the DS90, but looking through this visually the sun had a saw tooth edge to it, so, very little point in trying to use the larger scope.
A closer look at the 2 regions of activity, with the 40mm f10 scope, 3x barlow and the IMX174 camera. It's nice to see the sun slowly but surely waking up in cycle 25 finally!
Seeing wasn't great so resorted to the 40mm f10 scope along with the 2x cemax barlow for this full disk.
An unexpected break of the low cloud late on Tuesday afternoon meant I was able to grab a quick image of the sun when I got back from work. To my surprise the sun was birthing 2 new active regions. Taken with the 40mm f10 and a 2x Cemax barlow along with the home brew CaK filter. The sun was low and I needed to use 2x binning to bring the exposure time back up.
I did a quick scoot around the limb for the proms as the disk itself was pretty blank.
Switching down to the 50mm double stack setup was giving better outcomes in the turbulent atmosphere.
And a look round at the areas of activity:
An hour or two later and after a bit of lunch and the sun out of the trees and I decided to have a look in Cak, using the 40mm scope. First off the full disk and the good sky transparency was ideal for CaK proms.
With seeing deteriorating I switched to Calcium wavelengths and used an aperture stop of 72mm on the same scope to save some time. I was fighting the seeing and post processing came to the rescue with quite heavy deconvolution.
Dropping back to 60mm and a change of camera gave some cropped views of the main regions of activity.
Finally a view of the Ha full disk with the DS90, seeing wasnt great and the tuning is not quite there, but i'm pleased with the results given less than ideal conditions.
