Solar observation

The sky had been bad for so loonngggg... finally got some clear sky, not very good, but at least do-able for some limited imaging.

Photographs:


15:22, overprocessed disc, but it matches the prominence frame nicely, also uneven illumination is minimized.


15:32, this one is way oversampled, 5x barlows used with Borg 45ED, but at least it told me that at this image scale, the amount of detail is superb. All dust revealed due to the excessive magnification.

Very brief solar observation and test

Tested to scale up with the Kenko teleconvertor, it fails entirely and the solar disc couldn't be focused sharply, due to the very poor optics of the teleconvertor. So, the concept is not a problem but the implementation due to the poor lens. Sounds like a good telescope with a good eyepiece is a better bet.


1420

1421

1422

1423

Cloud covered very soon, hope I will be able to pump up the power to take some closeup active region shots!



I got it finally, but the sun was too low, poor seeing and transparency.

Also tested is the webcam trick, but the image is too bad for even pointing.

Partial Lunar Eclipse (followup)

The equipments for the first set of images and another series taken by DC:

Selected Photographs of the Partial Lunar Eclipse

Since it's cloudy, exposures are not always accurate, here's the set of image where the cloud were thinner and thus closer to reality:


03:36 (HKT)

03:39 (HKT)

03:44 (HKT)

03:49 (HKT)

03:49 (HKT)

It's harder than I thought: when there's cloud, it's hard to adjust the exposure to correctly record the shadow of the Earth from the moon, since it's hard to distinguish between shadow of the Earth and shadow of the cloud. Also, cloud would be moving all the time with variable thickness.

Anyway, it's a nice experience.

20060908 Partial Lunar Eclipse

Full of cloud cover, thin and thick, but still observable... However, that makes some of the detail lost, and the shadow of the Earth was not well captured, since some of the photographs were underexposed, making the shadow larger than it should be.

To address this issue, I intentionally overexposed a few shots, to see which part of the lunar disc is really black, or just a effect of cloud and underexposure.

All shots are taken with Borg 45ED, DMK 31AF03, no tracking. Thus it is an example to show field rotation as well.

more photographs pending..


02:36

02:50

02:52

02:58

03:01

03:02

20060903 Solar

Cloud never went away, but sometimes it's sufficient thin enough to form image in the focal plane, here's one of such shot, very short time window for capturing, no time to capture prominence, boring disc, people said 904 might come back, but this shot shows no hint of it:

20060902 Moon Observation

It's more like a test of the gun shot, to test my Borg 45ED in its new OTA, the moon was very low, deep yellowish and can be called orange indeed.

Same shot, at prime focus, DMK 31AF03, different processing style: