I arrived in Baguio last night from Laoag City and sleep early as I'm going to meet up with fellow ALPer John Nassr for a solar imaging session in the morning.
I wake up a little early this morning and prepare myself and head to John place to meet with him at around 9:00am. After driving his daughter to school, we head back to his place and start to setup for our solar imaging session. As we were discussing , John told me that fellow amateur astronomer Agnes Oclarit had passed away past 2 days ago from 4th stage cancer. I felt bad because she is a kind lady and has always been a friend of mine amid our organization's different views. I thought she was getting a bit better late last year as I got to see her post messages in Facebook. Nevertheless, I pray that she will continue to enjoy astronomy and seeing the stars in heaven with better seeing and transparency up there than us!
Anyway, after we setup and roll off the observatory roof, we started to observe the Sun first and later started to image the Sun through John's AP127 refractor on AP600 mount and DragonFly 2 webcam. We started out with imaging the Sun through H-Alpha light and we were able to see very active solar flares inside both AR11158 and AR11161 Sunspot Group. Several beautiful dark filaments can also be seen as well as 2 large eruptive prominences visible in NE and NW limb. Seeing was a bit poor but we managed to get some decent shots of the Sun nevertheless.
This is the first time I had the opportunity to image the Sun through John's Coronado SolarMax 60 Ha filter and the difference in image resolution is obvious compared to what I had been using with the Coronado PST-Ha. I do hope I would be able to get myself one in the future so I can also do some better resolution Ha work as well.
Afterwards, we revert to white light imaging with the same scope and mount but now with the Baader Herschel Wedge installed with ND3.0 and Solar Continuum Filter. The seeing now started to deteriorate further more so we were forced to image the 2 sunspot groups with 2x barlow lens so it was very difficult to focus!!! But we managed to still image the 2 groups through prime focus.
After we imaged the 2 groups, we call it a day and have some pictorial shots of me and John together with the solar setup we used that morning. We then had a delicious lunch at his place before he drop me off near the main road so that I can go back to work.
Thank you John for accommodating me at the solar imaging session as well as the delicious lunch served but the most importantly thing is that we both had a good time this morning and looking forward to doing more of these sessions in the months to come. I will be going back to Manila tomorrow and hope to continue monitoring the Sun as always.
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