April 2011 Sunspots

As we have been having some nice summery weather in April, it gives us a great chance to get out in the garden and do some solar imaging.

I have recently had a major equipment change, and sold my LX200 (sad to see you go) and I now have an NEQ6 Pro mount instead, with my trusty Skywatcher ED80 Pro onboard.

Luckily there seems to be a good selection of sunspots now appearing. I tried imaging with a newly purchased QHY5 camera which I intend to use as a guide camera, but I thought I would give it a go on the Sun. It’s ok but not a patch on the DMK21 camera. I was struggling to get 10fps out of the QHY5.

This image was taken with the Mono DMK21 with a UV/IR filter and Baader Solar Continuum filter through the ED80 Pro and I used some cheap Baader Solar Filter paper which was taped to the inside of my scope plastic cover. Even though this solar paper has a scratch in it and a big fingerprint on it, it still manages to produce some great images, at about only 1 inch across. The exposure time is very low in order to get the detail. I then open it up in Photoshop and add some false colour.

My only problem at the moment is that the DMK21 has a lot of ‘dust bunnies’ in it, and I really need to take flats next time to get rid of them. As at the moment I have to get rid of them in Photoshop.

Small Sun Spots

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: