Sunspots with Lunt Solar Wedge

[trent_julie]

Hey all,
This is my capture from this morning of the Sunspot AR1117 and friends, image details as follows;

Lunt solar wedge and ED80 telescope
dmk41 webcam and 2.5x Powermate
HEQ5 mount with Solar Autoguider
8 minutes of video stacked in Registax, curves and levels adjusted

I am really happy with the Solar wedge, the image offers more than my previous whitelight filters, even visually the image is just plain beautiful. I needed to use the powermate as I did not have enough inwards focus on the ED80 without it.
Cheers,

Trent

[Matt Wastell]

Cool!
How many alignments points do you use in Registax?

[trent_julie]

I used four of differing sizes....
one for each "spot" and then an overall alignment point...

[DaveM]

Cool images. I was wondering how a Lunt wedge would go on my Orion EON80.

Just wondering what the results would be if you selected say 30 sec or 1 minute worth of movie for your image given the way the solar features move around a bit over several minutes? I was surprised to find in hydrogen alpha images that shorter captures were sometimes sharper than longer ones for that reason.

[sheeny]

Very nice and sharp! Looks like a couple of alignment artifacts from Registax, but apart from that the result is excellent.

Glad to see some solage for today... I captured 6 AVIs this morning and all were corrupt... I have some big problems to sort out since upgrading my anti-virus software...

Al.

[trent_julie]

Thanks for the feedback,
As a result I have reduced the amount of frames placed into registax, and had another shot, to get rid of those artifacts and also sharpen up the image some more.
Thanks again for all the encouragement and feedback, it is really helping me to get better results.
Cheers,

Trent

[DaveM]

Very nice Trent. There is some good detail in those shots.

If you are in the mood to experiment, you might also want to try using AviStack, another freeware product that seems to do a good job on solar images by using a whole stack of alignment points (at least that is my simple understanding of it). It seems to cope well with the poor seeing that ripples across an .avi. I've just started to use it myself.

[Max Vondel]

Lovely, I've got a Lunt wedge coming.
Are you using the polarizers as recommended by Lunt?

Bye TheWay ............. Thanks for the great images!
:)

[trent_julie]

Max,
I didn't have polarizes fitted for imaging, however, they would come in very handy for observing, as the image is bright.

[Matt Wastell]

Hi Trent - great re process!
Looking forward to more of your images!

[sheeny]

:thumbsup: me too!

Al.