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I dragged my Lunt 60MT out and put it on my Manfrotto CF tripod with the gimbal head. There followed several hours of struggling to capture anything worthwhile. Image scale was fine using the ZWO ASI174MM without a Barlow.
I really wasn't prepared for the laptop. It was still stuffed with ASCOM and AWR drivers for my huge DIY equatorial mounting. So it kept wanting to do silly things I no longer needed. Which meant I had to delete a lot of unwanted software and drivers.
I was used to a 28" HD monitor in a darkened observatory. Now I was out in the open without any shade for the small laptop screen. Now I had to make frequent use of a magnifying glass. Just to be able to read the text. I couldn't for the life of me remember the sequences. For the various capture, stack and image enhancement software.
Eventually I had dimmed the image enough to capture some H-alpha videos. Adjusted the mechanical length to just reach focus. Pressure tuned the Lunt endlessly for sharpest H-a detail. Onto stacking and I was stuck again. This is software I used for literally hours every sunny day for several years.
It was so automatic back then. That I was usually capturing the next video live. While I was fine tuning the final appearance of the last attempt. Hundreds of videos, stacks and final images per day. Production line close-ups from my heavily modified, home-built, DIY 6" refractor. Now I was working on full disk with a tiny telescope on a fixed mounting. The image wasn't remotely even across the width of the sun. I could hardly see the image on the laptop with so much light bouncing around.
Well that's my excuse for the image above. No sharpening or enhancement. Straight out of stacking from a whole screen grab. You can see where I clicked on the image without progressing further. 😳
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