The Dutch Observatory

The rain and clouds moved thru and the sun was shining again.  So here an image of the Sun in Ca-K on 2010-11-17 with AR1124 at the right, 1126 in the bottom middle and AR1127 at the  left.

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 .

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