Sunspot 904 with the DMK

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi guys.

Lovely day outside yesterday, and took some time to image the growing and ever-changing Sunspot 904.

Seeing was typically woeful, and tube currents would've been rife with ambient at 21° and the mirror reading 15.6°.

I used the 2x barlow, and at this focal length I could barely get the two components in the same 640x480 FOV. Instead, I took 2 separate AVI's of the components and created a mosaic.

A separate avi on one of the components with higher gain also produced a pleasing image, so that can be seen on it's own as the 2nd attachment.

These are my best and crispest images of a sunspot, so I'm pleased with how they turned out. I stacked only 26 frames out of 2000 to get the final image, which shows how bad the seeing was.

I used the DMK21AF04, 2x barlow, R+IR filter, 30fps at 1/240s exposure. Gain was about 50%.

Processing involved alignment and stacking and registax, LR deconvolution in AstraImage, followed by high-pass filtering in photoshop.

Thanks for looking, comments welcome.

[RB (Andrew)]

Mike these are superb images.
You certainly put a lot of effort into it and making your equipment operate to it's highest potential.

[John K]

Awsome shots there Mike, extremely detailed!

[ving (David)]

great image mike, you can almost see dave p. on that second one

[Dennis]

Hi Mike

Very impressive images with a lot of sharp, resolved detail. I grabbed 904 today and it now has a bridge dividing it. Your images are sharper and it would be interesting to know if that can be put down to the higher frame rate of the DMK, optics or operator, as I guess the seeing would have been similar?

It would be nice to know the answer to that one, to save me the (potentially wasted) investment in a DMK or SkyNix 2.

Cheers

Dennis

PS - Definitely send these to Spaceweather

[Striker (Tony)]

Boy you do some nice work Mike.

Well done again.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Woeful or not Mike, it beats mowin' the lawn Nice images mate. When are you going to post some rank ones

[Mick (Michael)]

Wow nice work Mike.