The Dutch Observatory

It was a cloudy day today with some blue sky coming thru now and than.  I used this to make some Ca-K images.  I played around for a long time with different presentations and believe this is pretty good.

Frank has been working on getting a double scope mounted on his mount.  Today we tried and succeeded in getting two scopes to point at exactly the same object and track.  We than ran onto problems with Franks PC.  It needed a fast USB port to support the cameras we use and Windows said it was a low speed.  So we are staying for the moment with running the video from my laptop.  We’re gettign ready for a ISS/Sun transit Monday morning, but the weather does not look good.  But Frank will get up early just in case.  Here the Calcium K filtered images of the sun today.  I tried another presentation, which I believe brings out the Ca-K features better.  This is a two image mosaic.

Following a busy weekend, we did some solar imaging again.  We got some nice closeups of AR11121 both in the DMK21 and DMK31.  Here the processed images both in normal and inverted display.

We had the opportunity again to image an ISS-Sun transit last Saturday.  Marie Lott, Frank Garner and I met in Mansfield to  image the event.  After a “pep-talk” Marie decided to setup her scope and she was rewarded with her first ISS-Sun Transit image.  I gave the DMK31 a try after I was able to recess the mount ring by about 2mm and the camera seemed to come in focus.  However, it turned out that my PC was acting up with producing irregular transfers from the camera to the PC, resulting in only 5 frames with the ISS.  The beauty of AR1121 however made up for this hickup.

Here is the image mentioned in the previous blog.  Tom Faber explained it very well:  “Looks like you got both sundogs (left & right of the sun). Faintly visible is the 22-degree halo. The bright one above the sun is the upper tangent arc. Faintly visible on the left… extending from the sun and through the left sundog is part of the parhelic circle.  See: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/common.htm  ” Thanks for the info and link Tom.

Frank and I did image the Sun again today.  However, the Ha imaging got cut short because the light clouds became too much.  This gave opportunity to make a nice image of the sun with some atmospheric phenomenan (see the next blog).  Here the CaK  image with AR1120 .