15th and 16th April: Imaging the moon and sun.

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First attempt at capturing Plato with the ZWO120. SharpCap, Registax and PhotoFiltre. Still daylight with the wind blowing straight through the slit. The telescope is unbalanced and hasn't even been collimated. The wind kept making the images move on the laptop screen.

I rushed the results through Registax then resized the final image in PhotoFiltre before dinner.

Note the tiny craters in Plato!

Similar image but captured after dinner. Now after dark, with the slit facing further south. So the gyrations during gusts were not quite so violent. 

Needless to say I am delighted with these early results.

Using the binoviewers with the 2x WO Barlow produced about 175x visually but seeing the minor craters in Plato were more wishful thinking than reality. Interestingly, I could easily see at least three craterlets on the 4K laptop screen in SharpCap.

Just imagine the images of Plato I could produce with the 10" F/8! I had no problem seeing Plato's craterlets through that. All it takes is to come up with a working design which is stiff enough without massive weight. Though I doubt the mounting could cope with three telescopes without added reinforcement. The long moment arm of all three instruments is working against me. With such long OTAs the addition or removal of an eyepiece, camera, diagonal, solar prism or binoviewers alters the balance drastically. I suppose I could make the 7" into an H-alpha telescope and get rid of the 6".

I spent an hour improving the balance and then captured some more videos of AR2738 in WL and H-a. My 500GB SSD is now full and I have had to keep removing old videos so make room for new! The daft SSD has loaded every single image and video that was put on the laptop from new!

With Google and Microsoft both providing cloud storage I wonder how long I need to keep these hard drives full. I really only need the latest videos to process at my leisure.

My white light image of AR2738 still shows a faint, offset, cross-shaped bridge. I have converted the apple green image [from the Baader SC filter] to mono to bring out this detail. I seem to have captured a hint of the cellular, surface structure too.

16th evening: I was going to go out and capture more lunar videos but the wind has really picked up again. It is blowing from the east. Just as it did yesterday evening when it buffeted the telescopes.

Wednesday: Another long and sunny day promised but with the easterly wind still a feature. With the early sun in the south-east it will make it rather draughty in the dome. It's is lucky I haven't had the big dewshield fitted on the 7" to catch the wind.

Click on any image for an enlargement.

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