I just finished imaging the sun (all morning) then saw my granddaughter win her soccer game....now I am waiting for dark and plan to image the Whirlpool Galaxy.

Fingers crossed I keep these perfect skies until 12:30 .....clouds are moving!

All of that to say, what a great Saturday - free to do what I enjoy!!

Now, Mimi has fixed baked spaghetti and toss salad - garlic bread!

Can it get any better than this!!!!

Oh yea, the umbrella is a poor man's observatory!

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Thanks for the link - will indeed check out!

Eight years ago I would not have understood it either. But for those who have been doing this it all makes sense.

I am on my third Quark Chromosphere.....I had to return the first two due to electronic issues. I have not spent much time imaging the sun. So I am learning as I go. Admittedly I have a ways to go. For one, I am using too much focal length. I am rebuilding a 400mm refractor and plan on using that instead of the 626mm, Vixen 81Eds.....that will help get more of the disk.

I am using Sharpcap to acquire the AVI files. I post process in AutoStakkert where the frames are culled for quality (I am taking 2,000 frames at 125 fps and keeping the best 5 percent) - from there I am using RegiStax for their wavelet sharpening effects. Here is where I am gunshy. I personally do not like over sharpened sun images so my wavelet tweaks are minor to say the least. I cringe at upping those adjustments. I run a few high pass sharpening adjustments in PS but end up deleting ...esp when I see artifacts being introduced.

So for now I am looking for help and software that may be more suited for my taste....

Last - I imaged the sun for 6 hours last week and took a 30 second 2000 frame video one right after the other. I kept 230 videos and I am working on a Time Lapse Video of both the surface and proms. I was anxious to see if I could pull it off but this is really going to take time to process. If it turns out ok I will post a link.

Proms

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Surface and Active Sunspot That Has Already Disappeared

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Yes he is......he knows "up" stuff! ..and is the master of the Celestron AVX mounts.

Beautiful country - I am in Spartanburg SC - a few hollars down "yonder-way"!

You dun gooood as they say in the south!

Rod made sense!

This is a good video that explains "balancing newt" in vertical and horizontal....if you can understand the Brits accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGduG2jB9ec

I just read this post from Rod Mollise on a Celestron yahoo group and he suggested, "to balance your OTA when it is pointed to the area of the sky you plan to image."

I can't believe that never occured to me. Oh I know - it just makes too much sense. Especially when you are using a NEWT which is impossible to balance as the imaging train is on one side. ...well you can do it but it involves rotating the tube each time and balancing vertical in RA and DEC as well as Horizontal.....which means you do one and then the other then repeat and repeat until it gets close.

This was a biggie for me....for those of you who may be as illogical as I am.....this post if also for you.

Not sure about my photo business. I will stop weekend sport events for certain. Originally, I was going to be the director of the planetarium and observatory. I think the district - used some wisdom to hire a much younger phd in astro-physics, Scott Taylor. Scott will have the keys and the responsibility for everything. They want me to be on hand daily to oversee the observatory and help with the planetarium presentations. Scott and I will be the team. I committed two years - health permitting to help get things going. But I was preparing to scale down the photography business before this came along....and it is entirely possible I may not have any time for sports photography. I hate that but like a life of astro fun more. Time will tell.

The new school, Fairforest Middle School, will be completed by June....in fact we get the keys, weather permitting, June 1st. This next Fall will be the first school year. I have two weeks of training in mid July on how the planetarium works - lots of technology and software that I am not familiar with. We also have a representative coming from Astrophysics to go over the observatory equipment and software.

We have 11,700 plus students in our district - all of which will go through the planetarium this coming school year. I was initially under the impression that the planetarium seated a whole lot more than the 108 seats. Do the math and that translates into a bunch of presentations daily.

Not to mention the board wants to make it open to the public at least one night monthly. The observatory is going to be pretty special. In addition, they are currently negotiating for off site observing lease agreements.

Sooo, this next year should be interesting - different for certain.

This last week in March were clear sky or nearly so. I had two nights to image and ran three telescopes to take advantage of what "up" time I had. The Needle Galaxy was taken with an 8 inch Orion Newtonian.

All images were taken with ASI1600MM-C cameras (two are pro) the other is one of the early ASI1600MM-C cameras but still does a great job. Astronomik LRGB filters were used for the Needle and Pinwheel Galaxy. ZWO filters (I think they are Optilong) were used for the Markarian Chain. I imaged each target for approx 7 hours. Exposures of 20 seconds for Lum and 30 for RGB produced a lot of subs to sort through. I scored the subs in Nebulosity 4 and used roughly 50 subs per filter. Supporting darks, flats, and bias frames were used but were not needed....with those short exposures there was no amp glow and all three optical trains are pretty clean but I took and applied them anyway.

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Flats will remove amp glow!

Haven't gone anywhere - still plugging along! Tonight for the first time in a while, both Stepping Beyond and myself (we are like neighbors about 50 miles apart) will have two days of clear skies. So......if I haven't forgotten what I have learned - I might have an image or two. I plan on imaging two different targets for both nights.