Well we have had an interesting and educational day. Went to bed last night with the sound of heavy rain on the roof that continued through most of the night. We woke this morning to find 44mm of rain in the gauge and somewhat unexpectedly blue skies and sunshine that had not been predicted. This resulted in a quick dash to set up and grab some images. We started with some Ha images and then white light followed by returning to Ha to try and get a sequence for an animation only for the clouds to roll in and stop play. Then the fun started when we began processing images. To our dismay we realised that at some point the tuning on our Lunt 40 etalon was way out. Looking back we found that this had occurred several days ago and we had actually posted two lots of images that we are now definitely not happy with. We deleted the Ha images except for the animation sequence. So onto the white light images which went well.
Then even though the tuning was not great, we processed the animation sequence as the region of interest was in a relatively good part of the FOV. Having completed the animation up to when the clouds came through, we found that for the 40 minutes we had taken, virtually nothing had changed and we had 100 odd images that looked exactly like this one Good practice and nice looking proms anyway.
Not happy with the situation and now with virtually horizon to horizon clouds we still optimistically re set up to try and re-tune the Lunt and capture a Ha image. Many hours later with just a brief sucker hole, we captured 45 seconds of video. Just enough for this image, hopefully much better tuned. As a consolation for so much mucking around we did catch a flare around AR 2997.
Good practice and nice looking proms anyway.
