30.09.2020

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 Wednesday 30th 13.20[CET] 61/60F [In/out] Very cloudy but with teaser holes promising sunshine.

LST is correct within seconds. The mounting has just slewed the wrong way to cross the Meridia

n to find the sun west of the Meridian. Despite being Synced at the parking place [horizontal > East] it has gone well past the sun 20° and is also pointing far too high 10°! Declination drive direction has arbitrarily reversed. Manually reversed to correct. Now the sun has come out. Oh joy! 

Sending Home to the parking place for another Sync. Let's try that again. Sun at 195°. Well past the Meridian.  It should flip, but no! I has gone the wrong way again! Interesting. It managed Azimuth but was too high.

Seeing okay but the wind is moving the scopes though the slit. Hung the doubled shade net. Then doubled it again.

Fighting cloud and southerly wind now!

Now the PST etalon sweet spot is causing illumination problems. Dark above. Light below. The etalon is not responding to tilting.

A handheld snap of the sun through cloud using my 100-400mm Leica, zoom lens on my Lumix G9. Heavily cropped from 5000 to 1000 pixels.

Still fighting the weather! If the scopes go any further west I shan't be able to reach the keyboard and monitor! Time for a manual flip.  Tried a Home run but it wants to go north of the pier! Grr!

Manually slewed East on the IH2 pad. It didn't stop when I released the button! Well past east and steeply nose down by the time I unplugged the drives. It would not respond to the IH2. Realigned and Synced on the parking position again. LST is correct. Site is correct. RTC is correct. Dec Dir is correct. 

Slew to sun at 203°W. It went the right way this time. Missed the sun of course. Far too much cloud. And wind! Now the Internet is crawling!

 

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29.09.2020 Lunt 1.25" Prism for white light. + AR12773.

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Tuesday 29th Cloudy start cleared to sunshine.

62/60F: Seeing steady and fairly detailed at first. Becoming agile again. Telescope warming up causing thermal currents?

My Lunt 90° Herschel Prism has just arrived. First image with 2x GPC stacked with Orion 2x Shorty Barlow. The pores are real. Not dust on the optics.
That is pretty amazing for a first image!

Getting far too windy from the south. So I have had  to remove the Shorty Barlow. The telescopes were getting blown about too much.

2x GPC + Baader Solar Continuum on the limb. 

The Lunt prism is trashing the very old solar foil filter. Too many pinholes robbing me of contrast.

Next image showing native magnification with '174 camera and 1000mm f/l.

 

 

150/500 Lunt 90, 2x GPC + 2x Barlow, ZWO '174. NO D-ERF.

Second image with D-ERF. The seeing has gone off.

 

 

 

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28.09.2020 You teaser!

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Monday 28th 2/60F, overcast. Brief glimpses of the sun after lunch. A lost cause, but here I am all set up anyway. Now I just need the disk to show for long enough to Sync and start tracking. The gulls are circling overhead with a ploughing tractor roaring nearby. 

Clouds coming from the east? Breaking up! Seeing reasonable. I was able to capture quite a number of videos in a short time. Which is all I had.

At first the seeing was steady with a fair amount of detail. Slightly softer than yesterday. Which is promising. Though it soon became thermally mobile. Then the overcast returned. I was incredibly lucky to be ready at the right time. It didn't look at all promising.

I have order a Lunt 1.25" Herschel Solar Prism for the 90mm f/11 Vixen"finder." The years-old foil filter is diluting the view with stray light. It also means I have to remember to check I have fitted the dewshield filter before every imaging session. I can safely fit the Lunt wedge and forget about it. I was using a 1.25" 90° star diagonal anyway.

 

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27.09.2020 Sun in the afternoon with fair seeing conditions.

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Sunday 27th 66/63F. Overcast, waiting for sun to appear as I test the drives further. 

The sun came out after lunch. Though with cloud crossing. Fairly high frequency thermal agitation. Breezy from behind the dome.
 

13.40 Captured first video worth processing.

14.10 70/64F. Seeing marginally improving. 

Not sure how much my processing is improving. Though I am seeing more detail on the monitor. I'm wondering whether the strengthening wind is mixing the air currents. Thin high cloud is making the sky milky.

14.28 C-Du-C has crashed and wont open again!

Now the RA drive is trying to go via north to Home! The Sun is well past the meridian but it is insisting on slewing west instead of east.  LST is within 2 seconds.  I'll have to drive it to the other side of the mounting manually. A waste of valuable capture time with the sun bright and clear!

Now the seeing has gone to hell! I'm going to have to restart the computer. That worked. C-Du-C/Skycharts is back again.

The sun went behind a huge plate of cloud so idle hands played with the last image: 

 

 

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26.09.2020 Mounting drives testing.

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Saturday 26th, forecast cloudy all day. I had to rebuild the RA motor/worm assembly after discovering a loose grub screw on the smaller, timing belt sprocket. The RA slew had suddenly begun to move jerkily. I had made hex key access to the grub screws via a drilled hole through the edge of the motor plate. Which I had completely forgotten about since building the mounting nearly four years ago. 

Fitting new and longer grub screws required the sprocket be removed anyway. Since there are no celestial targets to practice on [thick cloud] I am sending the telescope[s] east, west, north and south via C-Du-C. A trip to the zenith is another option. Provided the telescopes don't collide with the massive, pyramidal, timber pier. They didn't, but only by 1cm. 

My finger was hovering over the "panic button" on the AWR IH2 paddle. Pressing any of the directional movement buttons will instantly stop a slew. Rapid slews in confined spaces with long refractors are not a happy mix. However frustrating long, slow slews might tempt one to wish for an overdrive setting. 

The tip of the dewshield on the 7" f/12 actually travels at quite a rate. Particularly when the light bulbs used to dangle in its path on overhead slews. These occurred daily when a flip was required after lunch when solar imaging. A 3 meter/ 10' dome is slightly too small for the 7" f/12. A 6" f/15 even worse at 6" longer focal length. [90":84"]  So choose your weapons carefully!

I checked the number of teeth on the RA wormwheel [287t] in case there was a ratio error spoiling my Goto slews. Then I set up a dial gauge to check the wheel perimeter's radius. Not that this tells me anything about the accuracy of the teeth themselves. 

After several slews to cardinal points on the horizon the telescope did not return to the parking spot. It fell well short of the target in RA/Azimuth.

After lunch I repeatedly sent the telescopes between pretend stars on the east and west horizons and back again. Only slight errors accumulated on returns. A brief glimpse of the sun's pale disk through thick cloud had me trying a Goto slew but it missed. More cloud stopped any chance of centering for a Sync. Then it cleared just enough for a sync in the 90mm. So much cloud it looks more like the moon. Tracking.

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24.09.2020 Solar imaging, computer monitor comparison.

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I am constantly surprised how my high quality AOC monitor in the observatory renders my images. They look fine, subtle and detailed on the imaging monitor. Which is driven by a high resolution ASUS laptop. [3840x2160] 

When I look at the same images on my Samsung HD monitor, [1920x1080] on my indoor PC, I am always disappointed. The indoor PC is not very old but is "only" HD. I just plugged in the Samsung into the laptop HDMI socket instead of the PC but the difference in PQ was minor.

Here are two examples of the same original image. The last to be captured as cloud robbed me of late afternoon improvements in seeing conditions. 

The detail you see in the images was just beginning to be seen steadily on the imaging monitor. Rather than only appearing after being laundered through the familiar image handling software. 

So called "lucky imaging." It sorts through the 500 frame videos I capture at the telescope. Then filters them down to only the best 75 images in a single, still image. Which is then sharpened in ImPPG. To [hopefully] bring out details which were never even seen on the imaging monitor.   

Once they are sharpened in ImPPG I finish them off in PhotoFiltre. A relatively simple image handling software much like MS paint. It does not have the sophisticated filters of PhotoShop or other paid for softwares. Which is just as well. I could never remember what each symbol does and why I'd want to use it. I just don't have the memory capacity to use them effectively. So a quick "spin" in PhotoFiltre is the limit of what I can achieve without a brain transplant. 

The image [above right] was considered fine for posting on my blog. Until, that is, I looked at my blog on my Samsung 28" HD PC monitor indoors. The difference was night and day. The image above looked completely washed out!

So I used Histogram, Gamma, Contrast, Colour saturation, etc. in Photofiltre. To make the image look like I remembered from the 27" AOC imaging monitor. The difference in detail is amazing at the expense of some darkening. Just look at the extra detail in the crossed filaments and surface texture. 

As an experiment I brought the 27" AOC [2560x1440] indoors and hooked it up via HDMI to the PC. As soon as I maximised Gamma on the AOC there wasn't that much difference in PQ to the Samsung HD. This was in a side by side comparison indoors on the computer desk. The AOC had been set to Gamma2 instead of Gamma level 1. The darker image had reproduced "superior" imagery when driven by the laptop. Resolution and image scale are both adjusted to suit on the laptop in W10 under "Display". There being a mismatch in resolution between the higher res laptop and the medium high res AOC screen.

During the afternoon I replaced the foolishly dangling, light bulbs with surface mounted, black plastic sockets. It was far too windy to open the dome in any orientation but north. I am using two Philips 7W LED bulbs at the zenith to light the dome when the slit is closed. Which isn't often but the light is useful when I am working on the telescopes or mountings. 

Having the extra work light doesn't matter when I am imaging the moon. The lights are deliberately placed just beyond the zenith to avoid lighting up the insides of the telescope dewshields. It feels very odd to have the dome slit facing north towards the overhanging trees. Because I am so used to solar imaging from east to west via south.

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23.09.2020 Afternoon imaging session. AR12773.

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14.00 74/68F wind blowing much harder. Sky more clear but white.  Back after lunch to check the seeing. Better than earlier with more detail visible on the monitor. If only the telescopes will remain still!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Changed to the PST BF for a comparison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Blogger continues to screw up editing and justification. It is now impossible to place images opposite each other despite widening the page and choosing the smallest image option. Images continue to vanish when adding text. Which requires re-uploading them all over again. Now a five step process instead of two. We are being punished by an incompetent [lower achieving] bullying psychopath for wanting to stick with the legacy blog editor. Power corrupts. Google corrupts everything. 

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23.09.2020 Disturbance near eastern limb. Morning session. AR12773

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Wednesday 23rd 66/63F, thin mist clearing with bright sunsh

ine.

The disturbed region continues its path across the disk.

Slightly better seeing conditions today.

It clouded over at 12.00.

 

 

Google Blogger is screwing up editing and justification. Placing images is now impossible. Everything was fine for a decade until they dumped a new version on us. Power corrupts...  Infinite power corrupts the entire world.

 

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22.09.2020 AR12773.

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Tuesda

y

 22nd 10.00 63/58F. Early, thick mist

clearin

g to sunshine.

 

 

10.17 First si

gns of activity n

ear the limb.

10.33 Changed to 2.6x GPC and pushed the processing harder for more detail. 

Google Blogger is still broken. Impossible to edit and justify text and images again. As I push images up the page on one side the images drop down on the other. When I try to justify text the images just vanish.

The seeing conditions turned to mush as the morning wore on. So I swapped back to the shorter Dec shaft. There is only a difference of 4" [100mm] but the longer shaft constantly protruded into my head space. 

50mm stainless steel bar is very heavy! Particularly when I am perched on a stepladder. I rebuilt the mounting, refitted the telescopes,  re-balanced and was imaging again later. As I tried to improve on my earlier efforts. Though without luck. There was no sign of the promised sunspot which was supposed to come around the limb. Just an untidy mess. I tried everything possible in ImPPG but nothing improved on it.

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