And the Sun goes wild!

 

04/23/2022. The most active Sun of the current cycle coincided with a morning of excellent seeing. I dusted off the Toughbook, the Frankenscope and ASI178MM, the LXd55, and the lithium battery. Everything worked great. I even got decent full-frame photos using the flatfielding routines in the capture software. That said, the ROI frames were better.

 

That's a six-panel mosaic using the best 250 of 1,000 frames and an ROI of 2400x2000 pixels. The best photo of the day came from the best 1,000 frames of 3,000 using the same ROI. The workflow described on the previous page worked nicely. Lucky imaging is intended to defeat seeing, but it works even better when there is no struggle:

 

 

Down below is the first image of the day, all the pixels from the ASI178MM, the Panatomic-X of CMOS cameras (or at least the Plus-X -- dinosaurs will know what I am saying). This is the best 250 of 1,000 frames:

 

 

 

Yeah, sure. Click 'em to make 'em big. I spent 132GB making them. That's about a dozen weddings.

 

 

My deep-sky photos are made with a variety of sensors and optics. Deepest images come now from a ZWO ASI1600MM Cooled Pro CMOS camera, an ASIair (model 1) and sometimes one of several laptops. A good many images come from an unmodded Canon 6D but a lot more will be coming from an R6. Video and video extracts begin in a Canon EOS M, usually running in crop mode via Magic Lantern firmware (but the 6D and especially the R6 will probably see more use). Telescopes include an AT10RC, an Orion 10" F4 Newtonian, and a pair of apochromats: a TMB92SS and a AT65EDQ. A very early Astro-Physics 5" F6 gets some use, too. So do lots of camera lenses on both the ASI1600 and on the Canons. A solar Frankenscope made using a 90mm F10 Orion achromat and the etalon, relay optics, and focuser from a Lunt 60 feeding a small ZWO camera will see more action as the Sun comes back to life (Autostakkart!3 is my current fav for image stacking). Mounts include an iOpton SkyTracker (original model), a bargain LXD-55, a Losmandy G11 (492 Digital Drive), and an Astro-Physics Mach1. PixInsight does most of the heavy lifting; Photoshop polishes. Some of the toys are more or less permanently based in New Mexico. I desperately hope to get back soon.

 

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