Digiscoping the Sun.

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I spent a couple of hours trying to image the sun this afternoon. I was using a Baader foil filter on the Vixen f:11 achromatic refractor. With 26mm and 20mm Plossl eyepieces with a Baader Fringe Killer filter attached. After a false start on the rather shaky 70mm Bresser mounting I put the Vixen telescope on the Fullerscopes MkIII mounting. My new synchronous drive was fitted but I made little attempt to align on the Pole. The telescope tracked but was well out of alignment.

The Ixus 117 camera was fitted to the Universal Digiscoping adapter. Then the adapter was clamped to whichever eyepiece barrel was being used at the time. The camera was set to Program and infinity. When set to Auto it insisted on switching to Macro as the shutter button was depressed. So I had quite a number of useless pictures of the eye lens of the eyepiece. Only then did I discover the ability to set the camera to infinity on the P setting.

There were quite a number of small sunspots but nothing very remarkable. The highest spot on the sun's image above was the largest and showed clear umbra and penumbra.  Visually the image was rather soft with lots of thermal effects. Not a bad effort for a first attempt on the sun with the new camera and fiddly adaptor.

I have found a suitable hill top to see the dawn Venus transit a only a few miles away. The weather forecast is looking cloudy with possible rain!

Click on any image for an enlargement.

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