Sunday, November 19, 2017

Solar Imaging Session - November 20, 2017

The sky today is partly cloudy but I still proceeded to image the Sun to see how the huge, long dark filament is developing. The filament has rotated inside the disk today compare to yesterday which shows a nice FilaProm. Seeing is fair but unfortunately, after I took this shot, I got rained out! Good thing I was able to anticipate possible rain and started to packup before it totally poured!!!

Solar Imaging Session - November 19, 2017 ( Huge Long FilaProm !)

The sky this morning is cloudy so I thought no solar observation for today but late in the afternoon, I saw some sunlight peeping out of the cloudy sky so I thought of setting up at the roof deck to try to image the Sun in Ha wavelength. As I setup, clouds are starting to cover up the sky again and I almost gave up due to frustration but nevertheless, I still keep my patience as I got top see a beautiful long FilaProm on the SE limb! Took me to wait for more than an hour before I could take a quickie shot of the prominence before it got clouded again :( I waited for another 30 minutes before I could shot another large eruptive prominence in the NE limb under very poor seeing condition now as the Sun is very low already and is about to get obstructed by the roof deck fence. Despite the not so favorable condition, I'm still happy to capture the FilaProm nevertheless.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Solar Imaging Session - November 15, 2017

The sky this morning is partly clear and we have no work today so I use this opportunity to do some solar imaging with my old reliable TV-101 refractor / GPDX setup. Its been a very long time since I have reuse this setup since January 14, 2017 , almost 10 months ago, so I'm pretty they are very happy that I opted to bring them out to the roof deck to be bathed under the Sun :) LOL After I setup my system, I had a hard time getting focus because I forgot already its best configuration for the TV-101 refractor and Daystar Quark to reached focus, I tried several configurations before I got the correct one and that wasted a lot of my solar imaging time :( My first shot with the TV-101 refractor was on new AR2687 Sunspot Group. Its obvious that aperture wins in resolution compare to my more portable Canon EF100-400mm IS L lens setup but the seeing is a bit more catchy on the TV-101 refractor as I'm also magnifying the bad seeing which was obvious today. After I snatch AR2687 Sunspot Group with TV-101 refractor, I reverted back to my Canon EF100-400mm setup and hoping to get a slightly more forgiving image with it. I also re-image AR2687 Sunspot Group with the Canon lens as well as a nice large FilaProm through the Daystar as well as a close up white light shot of the sunspot group. I packed up after 2 hours of solar imaging session exhausted but still happy. I might do further more imaging with the TV-101 refractor on Ha wavelength in the future with the Canon L lens as backup if seeing sucks.