The Sun on April 30, 2024

 I managed to get a quick pic of the Sun today in a hazy gap in thick cloud. The disk is much quieter than it has been for a while. ARs 3654 and 3655 are passing over the Sun’s limb. Some very small spots (ARs 3660, 3661, 3662) are emerging. Zoom for more detail.

 The Sun on 4.25.2024. This is a stack of the best 400 frames from 600 captured with the SeeStar. I'm pleased wih the level of detail from the 50 mm APO triplet in the scope.

M81--Bode's Galaxy

 More testing of the Seestar last night. This is an image of M81, Bode's Galaxy. It's the result of a 64-minute integration. The image is heavily cropped with noise reduction and color tweaks. Bode's galaxy is a spiral and is about 12 million light years from our solar system. The galaxy has a central black hole of about 70 million solar masses.

Here’s a version with a little more processing:

The Sun on April 24, 2024

The sun on April 25, 2024.  There are so many active areas visible. AR 3638-47 (at the very edge of the disk) is crackling with M-Class flares. These images are single captures between clouds and have no additional processing.

 

The Leo Triplet with the Seestar S50

 Last night, I tested the Seestar on a DSO. The Leo Triplet isn't the easiest DSO to image, but I thought it would give me a good idea of the capabilities of this little scope. Conditions were quite good when I started imaging, but they declined rapidly after the first few minutes, and the sky was overcast with a milky haze that obscured most of the stars. Add to that the light scatter in my Bortle 8/9 skies, and things were far from ideal. Nevertheless, the scope continued to show the triplet in preview, so I contimued imaging. After about an hour, I decided to call it a night. I had 38 minutes if imaging time. The final, combined image showed field rotation artifacts, but I was able to work around them with cropping. Here is the result. Not perfect, but not bad for just 38 minutes at f/5.

The Sun on April 23, 2024

The Sun on 4/23/24. One of the issues with the beautiful place where I am fortunate to live, is that I am surrounded by trees. Add to that a couple of rooflines, and my imaging is limited to a sliver of sky. Moving the RASA is a time consuming affair and setup is not simple. I decided to take a risk and buy a Seestar 50 robot scope. It's relatively inexpensive and will allow me to image objects I cannot from my current location. It is not a replacement for the RASA, or any other scope or imager, but an adjunct.

The Seestar arrived today, and I took it out to image the Sun with the solar filter provided with the scope. I just popped the scope down, told it to find the Sun, and seconds later, there it was. The image below is a single capture. I am extermely impressed with the quality and sharpness. I could zoom right in and look at fine details, all on my phone. The tracking was rock solid and the zoomed sunspots stayed firmly centered for the length of my observing session (about 30 mins).

This little scope has the potential to be a real game-changer. Tonight--DSOs! (Click to zoom, znd pinch out to zoom further--there's lots of detail in the spots!).

 

The Sun on April 20th, 2024

 The Sun is becoming much more active as we approach SolarMAX. Today's hydrogen alpha image shows a disk swirling with activity and numerous active areas. The first image is inverted to sbhow this texture more fully. The second image is the positive.