We woke to an absolutely beautiful sunny, calm morning with pleasant temperatures.
Talk about looks can be deceiving! When we set up our new SSM it told a very different story.
The average seeing for the entire session was 3.6 arc seconds with a standard deviation of 1.18
compared to the first day with the SSM (25/1/2023) of an average of 2.2 arc seconds with a SD of 0.74
This was confirmed on seeing the images on the screen of the quieter sun.
While being quieter, there are still eight active regions, all in the northern hemisphere with many small sun spots.
It turned out to be a very interesting and useful session, more playing with the SSM data than getting too many good images.
It looks that this instrument is going to be immensely helpful. This morning we didn't take anywhere near the number of images we normally do as it just wasn't worthwhile. We also used the 72ED for Ha close ups in lieu of the K102. This undoubtedly was a good move and saved the inevitable deleting that would have happened. Even the 72mm was pushing it. The 393nm stopped down to 50mm aperture for a full disk still worked OK but we didn't have what we thought was a suitable mask to stop down the K102 for the 540nm and the data did meet the bit bucket demise. If you work out the ideal aperture for 3.6 arc seconds and 540nm it's <40mm, so if we had just used the 50mm mask it most likely would have worked.
