Not much to see today 6-29-2013

Not a lot of activity and only a short time to grab a some frames before the clouds rolled in and clouded me out for the day.  Processed this time use a master dark frame in Autostakkert, seemed to help a slight bit in the final image.

Pollen, Wind, Clouds and Warm Beer

Lots of pollen blowing off the cottonwood trees, slightly breezy, and high level thin clouds going one way and low level fluffy clouds going the other way.  90 degrees and a laptop sitting on frozen icepacks switching them out every 45 minutes maintained a stable temp for the laptop to broadcast on NSN for a few hours, and grab enough useable frames to get a half way decent image out of it despite the poor transparency.  At least I got to test out the latest modification, built a solar finder based on a design I found on the web, and it works wonders for quick solar alignment without trying to read the shadow of the scope in tall grass.

Super Moon from 6-23-2013

Got out last night for a few hours to capture the moon while at its closet for the year, and a full moon, plus a jet transit.

Mowing and imaging

Mower overheated trying to get the lawn done, shooting between clouds and always kinda hazy so the images are a bit noisy, but acceptable for the conditions.

Thin clouds and breezy again

Short day of imaging, the wind and heat got to me, but not before getting a capture that didn't turn out as well as it should have, I walked away from the scope while recording and it drifted too far.  Only had 179 useable frames, and stacked the best 20%, so it could have been a little sharper despite the thin cloud cover.

 

1775 Still Pretty Stormy

6-18-2013 good day despite computer issues

Had a decent day, partly cloudy and warm, but high thin clouds persisted, but carried on broadcasting on NSN despite a couple computer overheats and other computer problems, but didn't give up too soon.  Caught some nice frames including AR1775 spitting out a reasonable but not C class flair, more of a magnetic storm thats persisted for days.

And 1775 during the little mini storm several hours after the first capture.

6-15-2013 Clear and Windy

Got out for a short time, got lucky and recorded 500 frames straight through between some wind gusts, but the NSN Broadcast got cut short when I nearly lost my entire table and computer to a strong wind gust.

Stacked 441 hand picked frames in Autostakkert2, wavelets in Registax 5, Levels in Gimp, cropped images edited in Irfanview.

More from 6-9-2013

Took awhile to get my other capture from Sunday processed to post, but here it is.

 

Then I actually had some clear sky at night, but the seeing wasn't so great, and rather breezy.  Spent some time collimating my Astromaster 114 with the camera, much easier than using an eyepiece.  This time I remembered to record in rgb32 mode so I got a color image this time.  Out of 5000 frames I only use about 1200 due to bad seeing and wind blowing the scope around, but it does seem a little better than my first attempt. Both images are from the same stacked image, just level adjusted and cropped differently in GIMP

A nice lazy sunday

Got out for another partly cloudy broadcast day again.  Actually turned into a quite enjoyable day and pulled out a good image trying out the polarizing filter, still have to process the image without the filter for comparison though, will post that one later.

More clouds and sundogs again

Fought the clouds and poor seeing yesterday 6th, and got a couple captures that definately are not my best.  Spent some time in the clouds processing the second image live on nightskiesnetwork.com, using individual frames captured between clouds, so the quality isn't too good.

 Today (the 7th) was a little better conditions to start with, nice transparency and a big clear blue patch of skies, but got quickly clouded out in about an hour.  Got a pretty good capture, of ar1765 right in the middle of the sun, and ar1762 just barely hanging around on the limb, plus a lot of plage showing on the oposite limb.  Almost blew out the center of the sun tring to bring out more detail in the plage during processing, may have to go back and redo the level adjustments in GIMP.

And, finally, had a nice halo around the sun again about the time I was packing everything up to go in the house and do some image processing.

Solar and Upgrades

Rather a cloudy day, and an unusual view today, actually had sundogs during the summer, very rare occurrence when its this warm.

And of course the best upgrade to the solar imaging setup, a better chair, much more comfortable than the old 5 gallon bucket.

And last but not least, the Solar images from today, including AR 1762 looking pretty stormy, but the GOES chart was barely spiking.