Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

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marktownley
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Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by marktownley »

I was up very early on saturday morning to polar align the mount on the pier and so was surprised to find the sun putting in an appearance by before 9am from my spot - very unexpected, but welcome! The use of MeteoBlue and seeing has been talked about alot lately, so I decided to put it to the test yesterday, It has been saying my values are about 1.4" from friday through to monday, and so I thought i'd try this out, both with the SSM and also (optimistically) by matching the aperture to MeteoBlues forecast. In this case I started off with the 127/1200 frac Mrs T kindly got me for Christmas, stopping the down to give me 120mm f10 and using the Airylab 2.8x telecentric along with a Quark. Just before 9am the SSM was giving me values of about 2" with occasional dips down to 1.5". The better dips were very infrequent and so upped the capture to 4000 frames per file. This came out ok, and was my very first recording of the day:

Imagear12804-ha-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Imagear12804-ha-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

It was crackling away with small micro flares like Marty and James saw. Moving target to the much smaller active region, and the seeing was deteriorating rapidly. SSM was giving more like 2-3" with occasional peaks below 2", this was very visible on the screen and the next image is softer.

Imagear12805-ha-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Imagear12805-ha-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

With this in mind, and sensing the way things were going, rather than waste time swapping scopes, I swapped masks and wavelengths and went for a 72mm/1200mm view in CaK. By now was struggling and post processing was used quite a bit more than I like with this image. Large image so worth a double click to see full size in Flickr.

ImageCaK-disk-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

ImageCaK-disk-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Seeing was dropping off a cliff at this point, SSM was saying 2.5"-4" so stopped down to 60mm with the same scope and used a 1.6x telecentric with the imx174 camera, it was fighting it at this point!

Imagear12804-cak-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Imagear12804-cak-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Notice how you can see the filament in this next image that divides the region of plage.

Imagear12805-cak-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Imagear12805-cak-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

The 127/1200 is a great scope - JAPP swears by it, and I have to agree, one thing that jumped out at me compared to my Meade AR5 that it replaced, was how much more light it lets through, exposure time is so much shorter, I don't know what is different - coatings, glass or both, but it is good and works, I recommend it. The stock Hexlock focuser aint too bad either.

By mid morning the SSM was saying the seeing was 4"-6", occasionally topping out at 10", but with rare dips down to 2.5", I decided to try out the DS90 again, at native 800mm focal length, using undersampling to hide some of the bad seeing at the expense of resolution. Not convinced i've got it on band yet - new scope syndrome means I keep fiddling with the tuning. Visually and on the laptop screen the suns edge was saw tooth so i'm pleased how this came out in the end, gain, heavy handed processing to paper over the cracks.

ImageHa-fd-ds90-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

ImageHa-fd-ds90-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

By lunchtime, despite the glorious transparency, the seeing wasn't worth the effort, and I came to the conclusion that MeteoBlue, for my home location just cant be believed, which is what I found in the past. Impressed with my polar alignment I decided my pier positioning was good enough to fix in place. That was fun in itself as I encountered a concrete pad with rebar in about 10 inches below the ground that I didn't know was there, the drill bit got snagged in the rebar, and so only brute force and ignorance resolved the matter, still, it does mean I have a better anchor than I thought I might.

Another sunny day again today, and with MeteoBlue promising me 1.4" seeing again my gut feeling is a re-run of yesterdays conditions, still, I can plan for it.

Hope you liked the pics!

Mark


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by solardave »

nice mark you liking the filter ok having nice weather up here to my ds hasn't arrived yet so was disappointed on Saturday


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by Alto »

Good shots there Mark....


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by ffellah »

You were able to get very good results given the conditions, Mark.

Franco


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by MapleRidge »

A superb series of images Mark...well done :bow


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by MalVeauX »

Great capture Mark!

Very best,


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by LTHB »

Nice images! The recent additions to your scope and etalon collection seem to work brilliantly, the DS90 has a very even field. The CaK looks great at full resolution. Looks like you are well prepared for the solar activity to get going!


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by Carbon60 »

Looking good there, Mark, in challenging seeing conditions. I struggled in Ha and CaK with my mosaics looking very patchy as the seeing varied so much with each pane.

Looks like your combinations are winners.

Stu.


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by DeepSolar64 »

Very nice Mark! A new 5” refractor. Awesome!! 😎


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by marktownley »

Thanks everyone for the kind words! Foggy today, which isn't a bad thing as i'm at work :lol:


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by arnedanielsen »

A very nice series of images, Mark!

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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by Montana »

Wow!! very nice images :bow :hamster:

Can I ask where you get the information about seeing on Metroblue? I have looked several times and all I get is a weather forecast, am I missing something?

Alexandra


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Re: Saturday Sunshine and Another New Scope - 27th February

Post by marktownley »

Montana wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 2:48 pm Can I ask where you get the information about seeing on Metroblue? I have looked several times and all I get is a weather forecast, am I missing something?
My graphic shows below...
Untitled-1.jpg
Untitled-1.jpg (645 KiB) Viewed 287 times
I'm not sure I rate what they say for my location...


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