20151218 Moon

Seeing was no good again due to the strong wind, it's not too bad as it will be getting warmer in a few days.

The moon was going to the edge of my observation window and thus I could only get this one, resolution lowered.

2018 (GMT+8), Ranger at prime focus.

20151216 Sun

Winter finally comes! Having said that, it means 16 degree Celcius only... it's going to drop to around 13 tonight, so wind is getting strong.

Rather nice transparency at 6/10, seeing 1/10 as created by the wind....

Reducer lens always inside the BF10 unless stated explicitly.

First up is an image taken with ROI feature, frame rate goes up to over 40 fps, but given the very poor seeing, it does not help much.  Taken at 1433 (GMT+8):-

This is what it called "skip" mode, full resolution is not used by skipping some pixels, which results in higher frame rate, but with the same field of view.

By using full resolution, the frame rate is lower and as you will see from below, the image is blurred far more by seeing.

So now the "skip" mode is even more useful than ROI. 

I found that ROI is not well implemented by SharpCap, it is not user friendly at all, one should be able to draw the ROI on screen instead of setting offset and the frame size!

The Dark Cube at Work: 20151202 Sun

After some experiments, the Dark Cube now works.  A reducer was used in order to fit the whole solar disc into a single frame, given it has 5M pixels, making it a bit small is still fine enough.  The reducer lens is just a 30mm binocular objective, dropped into the barrel of the BF10 so that it was sandwiched between the blocking filter and the camera.   The focuser drawtube of my Ranger was fully retracted, and the fine helical focuser has enough travel.

Seeing 3/10, transparency 2-3/10 with cloud around, so I only got around 200 frames to stack.  The T-max/RichView could be tuned more carefully if there was less cloud.

AR2458 on the left, a few small prominences around.

Taken at 1409 (GMT+8).