After 16 days of clouds, wind and rain, yesterday morning (7 July) had a small break of a couple of hours with only a few high clouds. So having missed AR3354 in it's entirety (limb to limb) we were super happy to have a chance to see the new big sun spot in AR3363. It sure beats just looking at the GONG and Space Weather each day. What was truly amazing was not only were there only a few clouds for a while but the seeing was quite good as well.
We started with trying some 540nm close up images using our 6" SCT. Then a full disk two panel mosaic in 393nm. We swapped over to Ha with some close ups of the same active regions we imaged in 540nm and finished up with an experiment of trying to reduce the number of panels needed for a full disk mosaic on our 72ED. To do this we put a 0.8 reducer/flattener before the Quark (we understand this is not meant to be the way to go but it's what we have). It worked reasonably well and only needed 6 panels for the full disk which is easier to deal with than the 8 or so otherwise needed. The only thing we did that was not as good as could have been were the flats. As the clouds were looming we just used one set of flats for all panels which didn't quite work properly. Hopefully we won't be as rushed next time and will be able to do these more carefully.
