20.5.19

20th May 2019 Solar/ SharpCap/FireCapture problems.

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Monday: A more cloudy than sunny morning. As we'd been promised no sun I made the most of it.

The drives behaved perfectly for the first time ever. On the first slew from the Parking Position the sun's image arrived safely in the centre of the heat sink of the Lacerta 2" solar prism. Sync! 

Interestingly, the telescope circles [reticule?] were sitting right on the 'E' of the eastern horizon when I "Connected Telescope" in C-Du-C. Another first!

Then I connected the ZWO120MC camera to start imaging. The SharpCap screen showed the same orange ripple. I have been right through every surface of both telescopes and found nothing amiss.

The ripple is on the laptop screen where the sun's image is shown. It does not move with either telescope and does not rotate with the camera. It moves up and down to mouse scrolls. Hopefully that eliminates camera or filter damage.

The image right is a snap of the sun's image side of the laptop screen. The similarity to H-alpha, solar surface texture is just a weird coincidence.

So I went though every setting in SharpCap to see if something was causing the problem. Nothing had any effect except displaying a dimmer image. As soon as the image brightened the ripple was back. Trying to use the resulting video in Registax includes the ripple. So I can't do any more imaging in SharpCap until the problem is fixed. Grr!

Onto FireCap then. I had to change the 4K screen resolution to make the ridiculously tiny labels visible. Finally I could see them without an electron microscope. For all the good it did me. The screen was covered in a finely meshed overlay. Making seeing the image all but impossible. Nor did it offer an Avi. file output. So my first effort at capturing a video produced 2000 solar stills. Each covered in the same fine mesh of course. Dogh!

15.50: Back to SharpCap. Temperatures 69/78F [In/Out] with dome's inner plywood surface above 115F on the sunny side! That white paint is looking appealing!

First video looks better but with a "brushed" fine texture. Made worse by Registax! The next video showed the same coarse ripple.





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