An unexpected break in the clouds first thing allowed me to grab a quick CaK full disk this morning on a day when the forecast was for wall to wall clouds. The seeing was really bad though, and even with the 40mm scope it was difficult to see sharp focus, I did briefly try with the 80mm to get a closer view of the spot, but I was wasting my time. This was shot at 500mm focal length with the home brew CaK filter and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera.
This is my favourite image from the weekend and also one of the sharpest, taken with the 203mm Airylab HaT at a focal length of 7 metres, it is really starting to pull in some of the finer details caused by the magnetic field lines and their influence on the electrically charged plasma. Taken with the double stacked Daystar Quark and Baader 0.7x solar telecompressor and the PGR Chameleon 3 camera using 2x2 binning to get 6.9um pixels and a short 3ms exposure time, which coupled with the 120fps capture rate works well in it's efforts to freeze the seeing.
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!
