20150213 Sun

I got no time to shoot that extraordinary long filament... but it's not yet gone completely, so I caught the chance today.

The sky was full of scattering cloud.

Let's begin with 5x shots first:-

This monster prominence taken at 2400mm is bigger than Jupiter in size!  I've never seen such a big monster in the last ten years!

And then we have AR2282 in close up:-

Let's go to 2x:-

This is that long filament, it's not unexpected that part of it was now out of sight.  Notice that the filament extends rather far out to form a straight and tall prominence there, so we know how "thick" that filament actually is.  This is a two frames mosaic.

That bigger than Jupiter prominence at 2x:-

Finally, we go for prime focus shots:-

My younger daughter Almy was on sick leave today, so she had a view on all those features... she loves the view too!

20150212 Jupiter

The sky was not particularly good, but it's not easy to go out either.  I didn't take any planetary images for quite long and that's why I proceeded to a nearby playground to take some shots of the Jupiter.

Transparency was like 7/10, seeing 3/10.  I was going out with the Nexstar SE mount and C5 OTA in a big plastic bag on one hand, and the tripod plus accessories in a backpack.

First one was taken at prime focus.  The ASI refused to show anything, but on re-plugging and re-launching the software, it works finally.  It seems quite sensitive but I don't like the larger chip and high resolution especially with my Eee PC, I have to scroll around to see the whole chip or I've to shrink the image at 50% but it was no good for focusing.

The Eee PC is now having a new Chinese 9 cells battery and it really has much juice to run on... after an hour of imaging, it's still going very strong.

Not bad and no good either.  At least, I have much better images taken with my Ranger!  Note the three Jovian satellites around.

A close up with 2x barlows, showing no more detail than the above.

One can see the direction of the wind blowing here... a signature of poor seeing.