Jaw Dropping Solar Activity Sunday

We saw a hard to believe solar prominence this past Sunday. It was this wide, squatty thing over the course of the afternoon, but a little before 5 it exploded outward. At first it took on a shape like crumpled up paper. But then it expanded into this linear filament that just kept going. If you looked at 5 minute intervals it was really different every time! I believe I'm being conservative when I say at its greatest length it exceeded 10% the diameter of the Sun. Vlad and I were the only ones to stay till the end, it disconnected and by 5:20 or so it was an evaporating wisp of a prominence. Been looking at the Sun for years, some times its great, sometime it puts you to sleep. But I'd never seen anything remotely similar to this.

Very sorry to say there was no photographic provision at the time, we were set up to serve the public. All we walked away was observation.

Hey all,

My very first post on this blog and I want to share my experience using RCX and DMK camera for planetary imaging so far this year. Just a week ago I decided to purchase Astra Image 3.0 Pro software which I read good things about for a while. It has multiple deconvolution filters and it combines RGB images plus a ton of other image processing tools. I want to share couple images that I have reprocessed from a while ago. First is Saturn from March 11. For some reason this is the sharpest Saturn that I ever got and I think I know the reasons why and I will share it more in detail next time. Let me just say it had to do with too slow of a fps rate that I was choosing lately. Saturn is dim and I was doing slower than 1/15 at times (even as slow as 9fps and I think with poor or average seeing we need to be using 1/20 of a second per frame which is 20 fps or maybe even faster. Collimation and focusing were also causing "blur" and I know how to fix both (for focusing make it 3 different RGB videos and then post processing pick one with sharpest rings. As for collimation, note to myself to not be lazy and re-collimate on Spica (its next to Saturn) the night of imaging.

Now, here is Saturn image. It is 10% stack, 1.5 drizzle. The Cassini division is fairly sharp but I have seen much sharper from other people, so there is a lot to improve on.

Next is Jupiter from way back in December... This was the only image I took at 27 fps instead of 60 fps (which shows "onion ring" sort of distortion inside the planet and should not be used in the future). The fastest fps our DMK camera can handle is 30fps or maybe 45fps, if there is such option. If you look at Jupiter's moon on the left you can see that scope was not focused and collimated properly, it looks like a triangle not a disk yet and still there is a lot of detail showing on the planet. Small bends are easily see, therefore it should give us hope for a lot of room to improve before Jupiter returns in the early morning sky.

And here is Venus couple weeks prior to the transit.

In the next blog I will go into more details as far as what I think the best settings to use.

Vlad.