29.06.2020 Prom at 11 o'clock NE.

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Monday 29th Bright but windy with lots of clouds. Seeing quite steady at times. Several disturbed area in the eastern hemisphere.

11.20 Nice prom at 11 o'clock NE. Swapped over to the PST BF for less gain and lower noise. 2.6 x GPC for scale. The wind is blowing around in the dome.

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26.06.20 Interesting features in NW quadrant.

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Friday 26th 72/70F, bright sunshine. The Sun has some minor surface features in the NW quadrant.

08.00 Struggling with "wobbly" thermal seeing despite an early start.Two bright spots are north of a much larger, highly  disturbed region.

09.08 Seeing conditions still highly variable.

09.32. Bright "ridge" in SE quadrant.

It soon clouded over. The forecast is wet for the next few days.

18.00  85/78F. Back to check the late seeing conditions. It has been a long, hot day. The dome feels like a greenhouse! The same features as earlier. Thermal agitation and de-focusing. The final images are worse than I'm seeing on the monitor. Mush!

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25.06.2020 Surface features in the absence of any at all.

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Thursday 25th 76/73F, clear skies. 10.30 Sun all but featureless. 

Concentrating on capturing surface detail. 2.6x GPC and B1200.

The etalon needs further adjusting to smooth the brightness across the field.

Seeing moderately clear and steady but drifting in and out of focus.

Several pale spots in the west.

Disturbed area in SE quadrant.


























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24.06.2020 Early steady seeing and then cloud.

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Wednesday 24th 07.50. 67/65F, bright sunshine. Slightly milky in the east. Steady seeing at first.

A disturbed area is in the low west of of the northern hemisphere.

A struggle with image placement on the page. So I have widened the page to see if it helps. It did for a while.

After 11am it started becoming cloudy from the north.

18.30 82/74F Back to check the late seeing conditions. Violent thermal agitation. The image is boiling furiously! It has been a long, hot day where it reached 76F.

Gong Ha is showing a blank sun!
No proms and no ARs. 😢


18.47 An oddity: A dead straight, narrow, black line on the sun's surface. It became much softer in the processing. Probably just a tiny filament.

19.00 The sun is now lost behind the trees without the seeing having settled at all. The ZWO ASI174MM reached 50C.

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23.06.2020 Proms and disturbed region.

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Tuesday 23rd 10.25 67/64F, bright sunshine but with highly variable cloud. Not much to see on the disk nor limb in H-a. Just the usual, random surface features. Small proms remain at 11 o'clock. NE.

I am cruising back and forth across the disk in horizontal strips using the drives and 150% zoom in SharpCap. Then following up with vertical strips.

11.50: 72/67F. Capturing the "smudges" in the northern hemisphere. There are fleeting moments of clarity.

18.15 Back again to check the late seeing conditions.The camera soon reached 50C!

After using the PST BF on the proms I switched back to the Lunt B1200 for a dramatic improvement in sharpness of the surface features. I can never be sure which blocking filter will be best for different conditions. It must come down to the degree of gain required. The B1200 is much less transparent than the PST BF. Which means increasing the gain. The ZWO ASI-174MM doesn't like too much gain or it goes misty and sparkly.

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22.06.2020 Nowt!

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Monday 22nd: 12.25 71/67F, sunny, but large, fluffy clouds moving quickly across from the west.

I toured the sun on the drives and there was nothing to capture. The same small proms at 11 o' clock as yesterday. Gong-Ha shows nothing of interest either.

Much later: 17.57: 77/67F. Surface detail. Just one tiny filament caught my eye.

Just in case anyone is interested here is a screen grab of my SharpCap settings. The image scale in the active window is typical with 150% zoom. You'll have to imagine this is full screen on my 27" AOC monitor.

This is about the same as I see when using a Barlow lens or GPC at 100% zoom. This is late afternoon with the sun sinking towards the trees. The surface detail is typical for a live view as the seeing settles down from its usual thermal agitation.  Though even then the steadiness is usually fleeting.

With the sun being so enlarged it is easy to spot anything interesting. Though this is not the scale of the captured video unless I add a GPC. When used in conjunction with my DIY motor and belt driven helical focuser I can be sure of the best possible focus.

The multi-hinged, screen mounting bracket is really proving itself useful. I can pull the screen out, tilt and twist it a little or a lot in any direction. It is much more relaxing to be able to arrange the screen to perfection and have it stay there. At this time of year the sun is at its highest. So that it shines through the over-the-zenith, observation slit. So I have to move around a little at my desk to avoid overheating and/or sunburn.

The multijointed, screen bracket makes this quite practical. Before that I had two flat plates in compact, dovetail form. Strictly WYSIWYG. A cap with a peak is always useful to reduce glare. It also keeps the sun off my reading glasses when I am studying the screen. I found the 15.6" laptop screen unusable. So the laptop just sits on the desk. With all the various plugs in its ports and excellent wireless reception from the house. The AOC is very low reflection. Though I still wear black or very dark grey T-shirts and/or black jackets. It all helps to reduce reflections to an absolute minimum. Not to mention improving contrast.

The next few days will be warm with continuous sunshine. What a shame there is nothing to capture.

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21.06.2020 Small proms & odd surface markings.

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Sunday 21st. After two cloudy days, with some rain, I am back in the dome. 

17.35. 70/74F. Gong-Ha showing nothing interesting.

A few dim proms around 11 o'clock on NE rim.

Some odd, linear, surface features at 7 o'clock SE.

I carried on capturing videos until 16.45.

Just cruising around the solar surface and limb on the drives.

Looking for anything interesting.

Lots of strange, linear features stretching over huge distances.

The seeing settled a little more just before the trees captured the sun.

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18.06.20 Prom + cloud + sunshine.

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It is proving difficult to place these images without them scattering at random across the page. 

Times and details are as shown on the image labels.

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