Venus Transit hint ..

[ZeroID]

Been testing my solar converted scope for next Wednesday. There is an N5 Baader Solar Filter inside the light sheild. It was still very bright so I placed the lens cap on with the centre hole exposed. This helped quite a bit so I got creative and added the 13% moon filter back at the eyepiece.

Worked a charm. It not only cut the glare back but improved the contrast, made the sunspots stand out more and gave the sun a yellowy green tinge which was much easier to view instead of the bright white. So I took a picture with the little P&S Fujifilm through the lens.

Heres my setup and a sun. If you look carefully you can see the sunspots. On the original pix they are quite discernible as is the surface boiling and the lighter area around the sunspots.

That's a TMB Planetary 9mm back on the diagonal. Enough to fill about 60% of the FOV but give time for the suns movement through the feild.

Also you don't need no fancy sun finder. Just look behind the scope in the first pic and you will see the shadow on the ground. Just look back and line it up. I hit the target every time.
So take your moon filter with you. I'm going to try a few others to see what they do for contrast or showing up any other features. Shame the N5 is not suitable for prominences because this is getting interesting.

[mithrandir]

Brent, I grabbed a piece of Al about 250mm long and 25mm wide, bent about 25mm of the ends up at 90 deg, drilled a hole in one of them and lined it up using one of the dovetails with the hole towards the sun. A bit of masking tape would hold it in place.

Once the image of the sun fell on the other bent up end it was close enough to get the sun in the FOV. I centred the sun in the eyepiece and used a felt pen to put a dot on the strip where the sun image now appeared.

Cheap as.

[ZeroID]

Good idea Andrew. I was going to replace a finder scope wiith a piece of tube with a hole and paper back screen but don't think I'll bother.
I can also sight it up just by looking at the shape of the lighted area on top of the OTA. Centralise the 'U' glare shape on the top of the tube then just go straight up. Bingo ...

[Les Kurma]

Punch a pin hole on a piece of cardboard,point it at the sun and project the image on to a piece of paper.
Should work without all the gadgets?

[ZeroID]

What !! No Gadgets ??? How am I going justify future expenditure if I don't use as many gadgets as possible ???
Tsk, tsk, tsk ...

Besides which it looks like the weather gods are going to kibosh any viewing for Wednesday ...... and Monday nights partial eclipse too. :shrug::sadeyes:

[mithrandir]

The grab handle on my 127ED has a slot in it I used to locate the spotter.

[Poita]

You will see a lot more detail if you adjust the levels in a photo editing program. I couldn't do much with it as I don't have your original pic, but there is probably plenty of surface detail there if you adjust the pic a bit.

[ZeroID]

Cheers for that Peter.
I didn't fiddle with it much as I was too busy getting it all working and the shot was just a 'suck it and see' exercise. There were actually more spots than the large one shown on your edit and I have been grabbing any sun opportunity there has been over the last week or so to take a look. Been a very interesting adjunct to night time viewing and now I've got the observatory going i wish I could just be at home to watch it all from there with tracking and video.

I've bought my 80mm Achro to work with an N5 filter on front and will set up outside our cafeteria and do a bit of 'Outreach' at the same time.
Fingers crossed for clear(ish) skies.