First go at the sun

[jahnpahwa]

So, working from home today, and scope still set up from last night as I'm hoping tonight will be decent.
It is sunny, so I put the solar film on the end of the OTA and booted up sharpcap. I have no real idea of what I'm doing, but at least I knew I was in decent focus from the night before. I manually found the sun with the mount turned off, lock it in place, spin the filter wheel to my Ha that I use for DSOs, fire off some single exposures at different durations to see which is best.

I think this was 3ms duration. I'm pretty happy with it! It looks a lot like what I'm able to see in the eyepiece, so is a nice record. I'd really love to try to get more surface detail, but am not sure if a 1.25" filter will do it. Camera is the zwo asi1600mm, scope william optics zenithstar 81 reduced to 455mm FL.

[Merlin66]

JP,
Adding a secondary filter behind a White Light filter can sometimes improve the contrast. The Continuum filter in the green is very popular, but it's worthwhile trying all the filters you have...see if one works better for you.
You obviously won't get the filaments or prominences you see in the solar Ha images - these require the use of a very sophisticated (and expensive) very narrow band filter (<1A)


I use the ASI1600MM for solar imaging with Firecapture.
I usually take an AVI/SER video of 400-500 frames and then use Autostakkert 3 to select the best quality and stack them. The results are much better than with a single image. In FC you can also zoom in to check and verify focus.

The size of the ASI1600 chip, 17.6 x 13.3 mm means you could use a barlow/ powermate to increase the effective focal length to around 1600mm and still get a full disk image. At this fl, the ASI pixel size (3.8 micron) will probably give sampling at 0.7 arcsec/pixel. oversampling unless you have excellent seeing!!
Hope this helps.