Sheltering under my shade blanket from the fierce heat and glare of the Sun, I watched in awe as waves of good seeing washed over the live image on the computer screen, revealing some breathtaking moments of steady seeing that lasted several seconds at a time. This one AVI was going to be a joy to process.
By the time I had slewed to AR1046, the seeing had slumped from gobsmackingly fantastic to just very good. I went to fetch the x2.5 PowerMate but upon returning, the Sun was blotted out by wisps of clouds arriving from the SE, so I packed up. Plugging the portable HDD into my desktop computer I eagerly launched AviStack, itching to see the quality of the data embedded in the 1250 frame file; I wasn’t disappointed, it was easily the best of the 3 recorded today.
In the final image we can see the remnants of AR1045 along with solar granules and faculae, bright areas that are usually most easily seen near the limb of the solar disk. I’m not sure if it’s just a perspective effect, but the main sun spot appears to have the profile of a depression, or bowl?
Great hi-res. Never had that quality of seeing from here in 2 years solar imaging, very envious. I’ve also noticed that sunspots nearing the limb appear slightly sunken.
Thank you to everyone for your nice words about this image, although please excuse the somewhat childish title of this post – I was a little excited at the time!
I guess that one day I had to get lucky with Sol, after innumerable times setting up over the last couple of years, each time being thwarted by either mediocre seeing or pesky clouds that seem to boil up from nowhere at the first glimpse of a telescope being deployed!
Thanks Matt. My best hi-res shots have come through playing the waiting game. I watch the “seeing” on the notebook display and when it settles down, start the capture and hope that the AVI run records sufficient bursts of good seeing to produce enough good data to stack.
Now if only someone would invent some “seeing software” that monitors the seeing in real time and starts/pauses the recording accordingly.
I’ve spent way too many hours trolling through AVI’s looking for the good ‘uns!
