20060526

Sick leave today, just woke up, had some noodle and did it.

Full disc, poor seeing blur part of the image, also the stitchng is harder with highly variable seeing:



A big prominence:



AR866:



Demonstration of seeing change during a very brief moment:

20060514

First attempt, registax two AVIs and then stitch them together:



Reprocessed by common alignment point method in registax, to improve the non-uniformity in the first stitching attempt:



False color:

Jupiter

Sky90, 5x powermate, dmk 31af03, poor seeing, so so transparency.

this one is not taken with 30 fps, a bit overexposed:



Jupiter was (quite) close to the moon, Fujinon 25mm f/1.4 c-mount:



The cleanest of the batch:

Short lunar observation again

20060510 2251-2301

Did a very short lunar observation last night, transparency was superb in Hong Kong standard, seeing sucks however since cloud are moving very fast, but I believe it's of low frequency type.

High frequency seeing would be bad for high resolution imaging, however, low frequency seeing would be bad since they would distort shape of the features. Anyway.

Equipment was LXD55 roughly aligned without anything (just gut feeling), Sky90 with 5x Powermate, DMK 31AF03.

Some notes for future reference: I can use the EQ mount inside home for the moon during these days, just a matter of timing, just put the motor compartment out of the way in order to steal more time before forcing meridian flip. Also, I noticed that the Jupiter would be also in the way around 1:00a, so time to be prepared. If the EQ mount is placed on the floor, even the C8 could be used, let me check it out. DMK camera fell to 10 fps last night, and I soon discover that since the shutter speed is 1/16s and thus impossible to get 30 fps. At last, I changed it to 1/32s and adjust the gain a bit higher and then 30 fps again.

Photographs below, I believe that they are either a bit out of focus, or large scale seeing vary so much such that part of the image is in focus and another part is blurred:

20060508 failed observation

The sky was pretty clear last night, probably due to the S or SW wind which blew away the dust from mainland China. The moon was also hanging very high.

I did captured some non-tracked shots earlier, and thus would like to do something at higher power, maybe using the Sky90 instead of the Ranger. That means I'll have to use an EQ mount, since I don't have any alt-az tracking mount now, the DSX mount is having problem which is not yet fixed.

However, I tried to point the mount from both sides of the window, it still could not point the moon. It seems like EQ mount could only be used during winter from my home window.

Thinking that I probably couldn't do anything better than the first night for non-tracked shot, I gave up.

Very short lunar observation

I can see the moon tonight, the fog during the day was gone, it's a test of the gun shot of my DMK with Ranger, other than the sun, to see how's the resolving power of such setup, 5x powermate was used for this shot, non-tracked to compare to solar imaging, so the number of frames are small (~100):



This shot is why I did this short observation, this shot is taken by Ranger at prime focus, which is the setup I usually use for full disc solar imaging. This is to see how is the resolution of my solar images:



This is made with 2x barlows, to show what I usually do on higher resolution H-alpha shots:

20060507 short solar observation

It's becoming hard to make Alby sleep in sunday afternoon, but I finally managed to... got up and steal the last few minutes of the sun inside my home, transparency seems high but it's very low in the eyepiece, very foggy view such that I have to remove the filter, inspect the telescope objective, the blocking filter and the front filter carefully to see if there's any problem in the optical chain!!!

First is AR880/881, around the same around of the solar disc as yesterday, of course, moved along with the solar disc:

20060506 solar observation again

Got to take some relatives to walk around Hong Kong originally, but my little baby daughter got to take a rest, so I took her back and enjoyed the sun for a short period of time.

1449, Ranger with 2x barlows:



I tried to merge two AVIs by PS and Registax direct again, found that PS did it far better, seamlessly I would say, but by Registax with a common alignment point, you can see a line fairly easily.

by registax direct expand with common alignment point:-



by PS post-stitching after stacking and processed by registax (same amount of wavelet):-



I love this view indeed:

Date back entries: 20060423

Place holder for 20060423 solar observation, 1439 HKT



1453-1454 HKT



Only very short cloud gap to do prominence, no time to do surface detail.

Date back entries: 20060422

Again, solar observation, some images are left in my hard drive without being processed for long, here're the results:

1406 surface detail, 1412 prominence



1404 surface detail, 1402 prominence

20060501 Solar Observation

Close up of 875/876, Ranger at 2x, SM40/BF10, DMK 31AF03:



Full disc, but merged very badly since the top half and the bottom half are taken far apart, 1544 and 1551 respectively due to cloud: