Sunday, April 24, 2011

Another clear day, but that was all.....

Spring happened on Friday afternoon through to Saturday evening.   Of course as always, the skies crudded over at sunset on Saturday.  I blew the dust and crud off the scope, opened the roof, and got the grease on the scope gears loosened up a bit with some solar tracking.
Did some daylight observing and got this shot of the sun.
My plans for going after some 10th magnitude galaxies in Ursa Major were again thwarted by our lousy spring weather.  Cliff Mass is right, the spring weather over the last years have been worse.   *sigh*

The techie details.
  • Camera - Canon 350D (with CLS filter, not needed, but I never take that thing off!)
  • Scope - Meade 12" LX200 with solar filter at f/6.3
  • Exposures - 10 at 1/500 second stacked with ImagesPlus
  • ISO - 100
  • Skies - clear and blue....then sunset happened.  Back indoors once again. Grrr....
(click image for the huge view)

2 comments:

AstroKev said...

Looks like you nailed ss 1195 and 1196. Is that 1193 on the right side? Interesting texture to that one.

Maybe we should print out the picture and hang it up on the wall so we don't forget what the sun looks like -- I think we're clouded up all week now!

Tom said...

Hi Kev,
I didn't research the spots very deeply just took the photo and stacked it. It does look like I have some other details around the spots on the right side, some of that lighter shade stuff. I'll have to play with that some more and see what other details I can pull out.
Yeah, good idea about printing it, I'll have to merge the top half onto it for a full disk, then hang it above my computer. I want to collect new data to process! Maybe I cursed myself going to Mt. Lemmon and learning new processing tricks from Adam Block? I'm so tired of this weather.

Tom