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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I made the trip to Indianapolis for the total solar eclipse on April 8 and was rewarded with perfect skies. I took pretty much the same equipment as I took to Nashville in 2017--an iOptron mount, Orion 80mm refractor, a Mallincam DS10C camera and a solar filter. In Nashville, I spent lots of time adjusting equipment for the optimal images of the prominences and corona. Totality was just a couple of minutes and I spent much of it looking at my monitor. In Indy, I was determined to do things differently. I set up the scope and started capturing a movie at totality. I adjusted briefly for the corona, and then went back to the disk capture. For most of the eclipse, I just looked at the sky with my eyes, taking in the darkness and Venus and Jupiter, and enjoying the general awe of the experience. I was surprised that the corona was not more extensive--it looked more like that in Nashville (near solar minimum) than the corona of a sun approaching SolarMAX. My movie did not have the best focus, and I have not done any stacking of images as yet. But for now, here is a single frame from that movie--definitely an awe-inspiring experience!
