Fought the wind and tranparency

Started out as a very foggy morning so I knew the transparency wasn't going to be so great, but I had the clearest sky I've seen in a long time.  Capturing 10,000 frames really helps to find enough good frames to stack.  Just couldn't get rid of the gradients in the first image.

New Focuser New Mount

Finally got the new focuser for the 80mm, and instantly modified it with some teflon mouse tape to shim and remove the focuser slop, it now turns as smooth as butter like a $150 dollar focuser.  Cloudy and windy, but the new mount is much more solid with the little scope so didn't have much for shaking issues.

Two attempts at AR2135

Rigged up the solar filter from the 80mm to work on the 114mm, and took a few videos.  Kinda crummy conditions today with the wind pushing the scope around and thin clouds passing by.  The first capture came out really noisy, but the second one at a faster framerate came out a little better.

Dual monitors

I finally got out to test my new Ioptron Cube Pro mount.  It definately tracks better than the old smartstar mount with just a lunar alignment and sync to target.  Had to dust off the old astromaster 114 for the night, and did a daytime artificial star collimation to get the optics lined up again.  And, of course I had to broadcast on NSN for an hour or so, just because its been so long since I had the chance. 

 

After Work Solar Session

Actually had some pretty clear skies after work, so I set up to where I could get a low horizon.  Transparency wasn't the greatest but the stacked images came out pretty good.  Especially the region of interest crop taken at 180fps for 5000 frames, should have gone for 10,000 or more to stack a higher percentage.  I was able to use some very high level wavelett sharpening in Registax and still had very little noise.

Cooking and Imaging

It was rather difficult to not go and sneak some roast beef out of the smoker while I was out imaging and broadcasting on NSN.  I was pretty hungry by the time I was done.  Still plenty of activity on the sun, we're not too far past the peak of activity.

Time to clean out some dust bunnies again.

Besides the two giant dust bunnies, one of which stacked out of the images quite well, I got a much better image than I have in a very long time.  Finally starting to feel like spring here in ND.  Had the pleasure of introducing a new viewer from Bulgaria on NSN today, hope he enjoys the site as much as the thousands of others that have signed up for the site making it the most awesome way to share our love of astronomy with the world, gotta give some great big thanks to Jim, the creator and operator of the worlds greatest live astronomy website.  Astronomy is a great hobby, but so much more fun when you can share it with other interested people, which are hard to find where I live......