The Dutch Observatory

Today I had some time to image the sun with the PST CaK.  Tried again the DMK31, but I need some more inward travel for it to come into focus.  So here two images with the DMK21AU04.AS.  One with active region 1120.  Two different ways to process them.

Earlier in the week, I have been experimenting with the PST CaK and the DMK31.  I had problems bringing it into focus.  Today tried it again.  Stephen Ramsden made the coment that I probably was 2mm out of focus, so I looked at the nose piece of the DMK31 and the mounting ring of the nose piece stuck out a little.  I need to find the proper tool to adjust this, so in absence of that, I used the DMK21.  This gave me a little more inward travel and the image came more in focus.  I believe I am still a little off, but as a first image of the PST CaK I am pretty happy.  Here AR1117 which shows pretty dramatic.

You know that I am not a solar image processor (yet), except maybe once in a while an ISS transit image.  However this weekend I spend some time to find some processes which allow me to bring out the prominances better than I have done so far.  Here the reprocessed sun image from 2010-10-20. Still a long way to go

Tried to image on thursday evening, but the seeing was too bad.  Last night it was a lot better.  Here the best image of the evening.  Maybe the seeing is slowly returning here.  The image shows the GRS as it just passed the CM and the oval BA has moved quite a bit.

We had two outreach programs on Wednesday October 20, but we had a lot of time in between, so we did some solar imaging.  Here an image Frank and I took of some great prominances and AR1113 at 19:21 UT

We did an outreach program at Charlie Elliott for the second group of the Children’s School in Atlanta.  At the end of the solar session, Stephen Ramsden awarded the Jon Wood Memorial Outreach award from his Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project to me.  I simply did not have any words at the time, I was too surprised.  but I would like to thank Stephen for this award, which is very dear to me for two reasons:  one, outreach to these students is very important to me in an effort to show them that there are interesting opportunities in astronomy, physics and space exploration, and second for it to be the Jon Wood Memorial Award.  To top it off, the award came with a PST CaK and a DMK31AU04.AS camera.  Thanks again Stephen!

The filament around AR1112 is still very active.  Frank and I imaged some of the filaments this afternoon.  Very cool, such a large filament.  We did see the beginning of this on Wednesday during our outreach program at CE.

Imaging Jupiter has been a challenge for me lately.  The seeing has been really bad so I have not taken much time to process the data I captured.  I might get back to that in a while when things slow down.  In the meantime I’ve been busy with outreach programs and keeping track of ISS transits.  Today we had a Sun transit at 12:45 P.M.  Frank and I went out to capture this and Art Zorka from Atlanta came out to see how we do this.  The forecast was for 31% cloud coverage, so we were prepared to miss the event.  However, the sky was clear during most of the setup, but shortly before the pass a cloud moved in…… and out.  Two minutes before the pass, I ran a test run on my camera and believe I captured another satelite transit the sun.  Than the cloud moved in and out and on the way out the transit happened.  The image shows partly clouds covering the sun while the ISS came through.