The Sun in Hydrogren Alpha with Coronado PST

This image of the Solar disc was taken on Saturday 6th July 2013. It was taken using a standard Coronado PST and an Imaging Source DMK21 AU618 Mono camera. I did use a Short ‘C’ mount adaptor in order to allow the PST to gain focus, without having to use a Barlow lens.

As the DMK21 is only 640×480 I have to take 4 videos and then process each one in turn using Registax 6. I then imported them into Photoshop and used the Photomerge software to align them all up into one image. I then gave the mono image some false colour.

Moon Images with 5x Powermate

I decided to try and push my Skywatcher ED80 Pro to it’s limit on the moon. I am really impressed with my Skywatcher ED80 Pro telescope, as it gives me some nice widefield views, and I also use a Williams Optics version 3 flattener 0.8 which gives me even more view.

The Skywatcher gives me nice views of the Sun, Moon and Deep Sky Objects. I think the only thing that an 80mm type scope is not good at is planetary imaging and small Deep Sky Objects, like the Ring Nebula or Eskimo Nebula.

I was a bit worried that my 80mm scope would not cope well at imaging the lunar surface close-up. But I was pleasantly surprised that I managed these images with the scope.

The setup included the 0.8 William Optics flattener/reducer together with my Televue 5x Powermate and the DMK21 CCD camera.

Focusing was tricky, as the moon looked liked it was underwater from the atmospheric turbulence. But once I had stacked the images using Registax (version 6 is now out) they looked a lot better.

This time I also took a flat image, by using my EL panel which I have encased between 2 A4 acrylic sheets. I took a 1 second snapshot in the IC Capture software in order to get the flat image. I then opened it up in Photoshop and checked the histogram, and it was about nearly dead centre.

For the first time I then used Registax to stack the frames of the AVI videos with a flat frame selected. The results were good, as my DMK21 camera seems to have lots of dust bunnies in it, but I think most DMK cameras must suffer from this problem.