See Spot. See Spot turn

 

6/16/2016. On the meridian. The big spot is just about halfway across the face of the Sun on its second transit. The bright, disturbed area following the spot erupted in a pair of flares that almost reached "C" levels.

 

Four panels, best 50 of 500 frames each.
Yes, you can click it.

 

Pretty much the same tech specs as before,
except a single clip with gamma adjusted in FireCapture
to show low-surface-brightness features.

 

6/18/2016. Not because anything particularly spectacular was happening, but just because I could:

Best about 10% of two, 500-frame clips.

 

Actually one side uses almost twice as many frames as the other. In AutoStakkert, I picked the frames from each clip that ended up significantly on the "good" side of par when sorted by estimated quality. For these two clips, that was about 58 frames on one side and 102 on the other.

 

 

Except where noted, deep-sky photos are made with an SBIG ST2000XM CCD behind a 10-inch Astro-Tech Ritchey-Chretien carried on an Astro-Physics Mach1GTO. The CCD is equipped with Baader wide- and narrow-band filters. The internal guide chip of the CCD most often keeps the OTA pointed in the right direction (I'll let you know when an OAG or guidescope takes its place). Camera control and guiding are handled by Maxim DL 5.12. The stock focuser on the AT10RC has been augmented with Robofocus 3.0.9 using adapters turned on the lathe downstairs. A Canon 6D and a modded 50D find themselves mounted on an Orion 10" F4 Newtonian or carrying widefield glass on an iOptron Skytracker. Beginning in May 2013, PixInsight has taken over more and more of the heavy lifting -- alignment, stacking, gradient removal, noise-reduction, transfer function modification, color calibration, and deconvolution. Photoshop CS4 et seq and the Focus Magic plugin get their licks in, too.

 

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