I've found it a challenge to gather an airline friendly, yet reasonably high resolution h-alpha system, to take to just north of Tennant Creek for the May 10th eclipse.
To add to the drama, my Point Grey Grasshopper express died last week, but kudos to PGR, they shipped me a loaner while mine is being fixed. The downside of these cameras is they pump out about 5 Gig of data per minute, via a firewire 800 port. All PC-express card solutions require additional external power to the card, to power the camera: a messy solution
Since there are no Windows PC's that I am aware of that have a native Firewire 800 port, my fix was to replace my (old) MacBook Pro's hard drive with a SSD, re-install it's native MacOS, then install bootcamp to run Windows.
The camera plugs straight into the MacBook firewire 800 port, which now thinks its a PC, and no external power required!
plus the SSD happily sucks up the data at 12fps
The rest of the system is a Coronado 90mm, fitted to a Taka 85mm FSQ via a custom Precise parts adapter . A Baader FFC nicely increases the Baby-Q's focal length to fill the PGR's sensor. My Losmandy Starlapse and Manfrotto seem pretty happy with the payload.
The results? While not as good as my usual observatory set-up, today's test run went well.
The result is here
