03/24/2012. Very quiet air and a relatively quiet Sun. I uncovered the telescope and got this right after the Sun passed the meridian pines. It's a mosaic two frames tall and two frames deep. I collected the data just before leaving for Christopher's Wine & Cheese in Blowing Rock and assembled the image when we got home. Not the best joinery here, but it's promising. The limb image by itself looks pretty elegant, too, but here it is all together:
300 x 8ms x 2
300 x 48ms x 2
03/26/2012. Sparkling skies today, all day long. I picked up the Sun out of the trees to the east and revisited it in the afternoon. I kept the image on the second monitor all day, just in case something spectactular happened. Here are three images, each a composite of long and short exposures. The first two are from the morning session, the last from about six hours later. Note the changes in the limb prominence and that improved seeing allowed higher magnification:
Bottom two: AR1445
3/27/2012. New, not particularly active but active enough region 1445 continues to rotate onto the disk. I've rearranged the photos above to appear on one page so it's easier to see it coming around the rim, bringing its prominences along, turning them into filaments as seen this morning. By all accounts, AR1429 is still active and will be coming back into view soon.
Later that same day, when the Sun emerged from the meridian pines, I selected a "region of interest" centered on active region 1445 and captured 1,000 frames at 30 fps. I did this for two reasons: I wanted to see if the extra frame rate and frame count produced a better image (not particularly), and I wanted a smaller image I could convert to web video to show just how much the image moves around from atmospheric turbulence (the better to appreciate what AVIStack, Registax, and Focus Magic do). Here's a 1,000-frame clip captured by a Point Grey Research Chameleon camera. It's presented in Flash, so iPads are out of luck today. If the image isn't moving, just click on it. All the shimmering and squirming is your atmosphere at work:
(Stopped? Click the image to make it go.)
And here's the image distilled from the video:
The pollen is pretty vicious, too, so I'm keeping the mount and the CCD wrapped up today. Maybelle the black and white cat comes home green. The A-P handpad is facedown; the netbook is inside the black box.
Except where noted, solar photos are made with a Point Grey Research Chameleon camera behind a Lunt Solar Systems 60mm THa solar telescope double-stacked wtih a 50mm front etalon for an achieved bandwidth of about 0.55 Angstroms. The telescope uses a B600 blocking filter and is mounted piggyback with an Astro-Tech 10-inch Ritchey-Chretien (carefully capped!) on an Astro-Physics Mach1GTO mount. An Acer Aspire One netbook running Point Grey's Flycap software provides camera control and capture services via USB 2.0. Images typically begin as 20 second AVI's captured at 15 fps. 300 frame clips are aligned and stacked using Registax 6 or AVIStack 2.0. The resulting files are processed via wavelet functions in Registax and / or the FocusMagic 3.0.2 deconvolution plug-in in Photoshop CS4. (PixInsight is rapidly supplanting some of those steps.) The imaging train usually includes an Orion "Shorty" 2x barlow screwed into the 1.25-inch prime-focus snout. Exposures are on the order of 4-8 ms with gain set to 10-12 db, or 12-18ms at 0 gain. The barlow is sometimes replaced by an Antares 0.5x telecompressor sandwiched between the 1.25-inch snout and the C-adapter on the PGR Chameleon; this produces a full-disk image (during most of the year) and allows exposures in the 1ms range with slightly less gain. A RoboFocus motor with a timing belt looped around the stock (or, sometimes, a Feathertouch) focus knob enables remote operation.
