Astronomy Log

After several days of cloud and rain, the clouds parted and I managed to get a shot of the current sun with its sunspots.

These are recorded as sunspots 1092 and 1093 from left to right.

This is not a great image, as it’s a bit blurred. Taken with my homemade DSLR solar filter on my camera using my 300mm lens.

I managed to do a bit of imaging today as the Sun was out all day. I went and purchased a sheet of A4 Baader Solar Filter paper from Green Witch the other day, they were the cheapest place I could find, plus I got my SPA discount as well. It also gave me my first chance to visit them in Dry Drayton.

Anyway, I produced a couple of solar filters for my LX200 and my ED80 Pro from the paper sheet so was dying to try them out (which was a nightmare trying to cut, as I couldn’t stop my fingers leaving fingerprints on the paper, plus you need to remember to remove a really thin piece of plastic that is attached to the filter paper).

Both worked really well, I have also just purchased a 2nd hand DMK21 camera, which is so much better than my SPC900 webcam, which I about to sell. So imaging with this was fun as the more practice I get on the DMK21 the better. I also used my Baader Solar Continuum filter which I have had for ages but never really got to use as I did not think that the SPC900 gave enough brightness of the object to use a dark green filter, but the DMK21 handles it with ease as you have a lot more control over your gain, exposure and gamma settings.

The great thing was that I was able to record granulation on my images, something I could never do with the SPC900 webcam, maybe it’s the Baader Solar Filter paper that made it possible, but I think it was really the DMK21 camera.

I processed them all in Registax 5 and then added some false colour in Fireworks. The distant image was taken with a Skywatcher ED80 Pro and the close-up shots with my 10″ LX200.

Writing this blog post from actually inside the observatory today, now I have sorted out my internet access, by using a powerline adaptor which passes the network data through your home electrical wires and is a lot more stable than wireless. especially if you are any distance away from the house.

Did not expect to do any imaging today, just opened the roof to check on the Sun and see if there was any activity, and there was, even better than when I looked a couple of weeks ago.

Here are my images, the enlarged images of the sunspots were taken on my 10″ LX200 with a glass solar filter, using an SPC900 webcam and then stacking in registax, one in colour and one in black and white.

The large shot of the Sun below was taken via my Canon 450D SLR using a Televue 2x Barlow on my 80mm refractor with a Mylar paper solar filter.

Today it’s snowing, but yesterday I managed to view the Sun and do some imaging – crazy weather!

Usually when viewing the Sun at the moment it’s a very uninteresting sinle coloured disc, but today (20th February 2010) I was amazed to see two small sunspots on the face of the Sun.

With this being such an unusual occurence lately I had to get some images.

Before I purchased my guidescope I only had solar filters for the LX200, by way of a hartmann mask and a glass ETX solar filter. Now I also have a mylar sheet type filter for my small refractor. Both provide different colours of the Sun.

The ETX glass solar filter gives an orange colour to the Sun, whilst the mylar sheet provides a kind of white colour.

The sunspots are so small you may have trouble seeing them on these images, but they are on the lower right hand corner. Click on the image to enlarge it.

First the mylar image on the refractor:

The image from my LX200 using an ETX glass solar:

My partial solar eclipse photo was also picked up by ITV Anglia News on the evening programme on 1st August 2008.

Thanks to Anglia News for sending me the video, as I missed it on TV.

My photo is the first image (Daniel Coe, Ely).

Sky News have also added my partial solar eclipse image to its website, I have taken a snapshot of the Sky News page below, click on the image to see it fullsize.

If you want to see the image on Sky News, (and hopefully the link still works), click here.

After taking my couple of photos of the partial solar eclipse I sent them to BBC Look East, and one of the images was shown on the TV in the weather section of the program along with other peoples photos as well.

Below is a video of the program, mine is the last photo in the stack.

I managed to get outside early enough to start taking some images today with my Canon DSLR and using a Meade f3.3 focal reducer and LX200 telescope. 

I did begin trying to use a webcam to record the whole event, as I would have liked to have had a video of the whole event, but with a lot of cloud and not being able to see the laptop screen outside, I gave up and used the digital camera instead.

My images show a mirror image as the moon passed the sun on the top left, and not the bottom right, maybe next time I should flip the images first in a paint program before displaying them.

This seems a bit of a strange blog post title, but I was finding it difficult to get my LX200 telescope to actually find and track the sun when I was undertaking some solar observing.

The first time I found the Sun it was by chance, as it’s difficult when you can’t actually look at the Sun or use the viewfinder to locate the Sun.

There are a few different ways to locate the sun, but the reason I really wrote this post is to tell you about the new piece of kit I got for my Birthday for about £20, which now makes finding the Sun really easy.

I have a Sun location file which you can upload to your telescope which allows you to have the location of the Sun in your LX200 handset, you can find it on my downloads page.

I also read somewhere that you can locate the Sun when the reflection of the telescope tripod on the ground is at it’s smallest.

But I purchased the Astro Engineering AC466 item which turns your viewfinder into a solar viewfinder.

All it does is fit over the end of your viewfinder and it’s then tightened via a thumbscrew. It has a hole in one end and cross-hairs at the other end.

All you then need to do is then align the white spot, which is the Sun coming through the small hole onto the cross-hairs and the Sun is centered! Brilliant and easy for around £20.

The AC466 solar finder fits directly over the front of the standard 50mm finder of the type used on Meade®, Celestron, Sky Watcher and many other telescopes.

I recently purchased a second hand Hartmann mask together with an ETX90 solar filter from astrobuysell. Today I had my first chance to try it out and view the sun.

The Hartmann mask covers the front of the LX200, just like the telescope cover. It contains three screws which are tightened so that the mask cannot be accidentally removed or fall off. The solar filter screws into one of the masks three viewing holes. The glass solar filter is actually designed primarily for use by the ETX90 telescope.

I had no idea of how to get the LX200 and autostar to find and keep track of the sun. I had never used the telescope before in the daytime. I began by letting the LX200 go through it’s set up procedure and then just pressed ‘Enter’ when it asked me to align to the brightest star. I then looked on Starry Night Pro for a star near to the Sun, and selected that.

It was difficult to know where the telescope was pointing, so I also looked on Starry Night Pro to find out the RA and Dec positions of the Sun. I then entered these into Autostar and had the telescope slew to this position. After a little tweaking I found the Sun in the eyepiece.

I initially decided I was only going to view the Sun through my Philips web cam, but after not being able to get an image through the web cam I decided to view the sun through the eyepiece using my 40mm Antares eyepiece.

I had already fitted my f/6.6 focal reducer to the telescope which allowed me to view the whole disc of the sun in the eyepiece.

I then swapped out the eyepiece and inserted my webcam, but did not manage to get the sun to display on the laptop, nor did I manage to use my Canon DSLR to get some images. So instead I just put my Canon IXUS up to the eyepiece and took a photo, and here it is:

As you can see there are no distinguishing marks on the image, perhaps some new filters will change this, as I have been reading a lot about H-alpha pass filters and Solar Continuum filters.