Testing a mount set up 16 March 2023

[Averton]

The forecast was for clear skies this morning which once again didn't eventuate. By the time the clouds had cleared it was a blustery hot wind and not very pleasant at all. We wouldn't have bothered imaging if it hadn't been for the fact that we needed to test a mount set up for our early morning location. The normal mount we used in this location we are selling as it's a good mount but rarely gets used. This meant that we had to resurrect an old alt-az SCT mount of very dubious quality. We have made an DIY wedge for it and have it connected via a Raspberry Pi running K-Stars to make it wifi. This means we can connect to it where ever it is located around the yard for those times that we can't use our proper set up. The mount performed as poorly as anticipated but the pleasant surprise was yet another towering prom, this time just west of north. From our measurements it was about 130,000km tall so approx 10 Earths +/- an Earth among friends :)
The seeing was predictably poor at an average of 3.2 arc seconds with a standard deviation of 0.8.
So here we have full disk mosaic in Ha and a full disk in 393nm.

[John W]

Interesting mount P and C. A nice prom - I saw that visually but didn't take any pics. Sunspot activity seems to have diminished for the time being. Cheers, John W.

[Averton]

Thanks John. Yes the sunspot activity is definitely down at the moment but made up for by some good proms.