The last day of May and a subtly different CaK full disk. This was taken with the little 40mm scope at 400mm focal length on an undriven camera tripod. Not something I want to try again in a hurry as it was a real pain to get a decent stacked image out of autostakkert with it bouncing around all the time. Still, I got a shot in the end! The homebrew CaK filter was used as was the PGR Chameleon 3 camera.
Firecapture was playing up on my laptop on thursday morning, and I tried a newer version of the software. To my surprise I was able to capture at 120 fps, with the laptop behaving itself! This seemed to have a positive effect and I got some nice images from the session. I really like how this image of the active region came out. Taken with the 203mm Airylab HaT at 4250mm focal length, a double stacked Daystar Quark and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera using 2x2 binning to give 6.9um pixels and nice short exposure times in an attempt to freeze the seeing.
The active regions of the past days are slowly starting to rotate out of view as can be seen in this full disk taken with the 40mm scope at 500mm focal length with the PGR Chameleon 3. The closeup was taken with the PGR Blackfly IMX249 camera using a 2x barlow lens. Excuse the dust bunny!
The seeing was behaving itself a bit on thursday morning with the HaT and I was pleased to get some nice images with the 203mm scope. These regions of pampas grass plage and plasma are all that remains of the groups of active regions from a few rotations ago now, and at this scale there is still plenty going on with them. The Baader Solar Telecompressor was used to give a 0.75x reduction factor giving an effective focal length of roughly 4250mm. The camera was the PGR Chameleon 3 using 2x2 binning to give 6.9um effective pixels and also a much shorter exposure time in an attempt to freeze the seeing, which it seems to have done.
Despite heading on a journey towards solar minima the suns current geoffective face is quite busy, with bands of activity either side of the solar equator. These are slowly rotating away, and not much seems to be rotating to replace it - we will see over the coming days I guess! Taken with the 40mm scope at ~500mm focal length with the homebrew CaK filter and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera.
Despite being small, this active region had an interesting amount going on, the single spot was visible faintly on the photosphere, while its bipolar counterpart was seen as a small flaring region. Dark, cooler plasma tendrils can be seen extending from the active region corresponding to the magnetic field lines. Taken with the 0.2m Airylab HaT, double stacked Daystar Quark, Baader 0.7x solar telecompressor to bring the focal length back to about 4250mm focal length, with the PGR Chameleon 3 camera using 2x2 binning to increase the effective pixel size, their sensitivity and then reduce the exposure time with the result of freezing the seeing conditions.
This image of this small active region reveals the photospheric ghost of the sunspot that was once prominent. The seeing wasn't great and passing haze bands meant that an animation wasn't possible, which was a shame as at this scale there was plenty going on. Taken with the 203mm Airylab HaT at ~4250mm focal length, using the 0.7x Baader solar telecompressor and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera using 2x2 binning to freeze the seeing by means of a shorter exposure time.
