The Sun in HA

With the transit of Venus coming up in a few weeks I decided to take my solar telescope out. For those of you who have never heard of Coronado's (now Meade's) Personal Solar Telescope I'd encourage you to check it out.  It runs for about $500 and is one of the cheapest ways to look at the sun in Hydrogen Alpha.  Although it gives a tiny, full disk view of the sun its the easiest way to see solar flares and prominences that aren't visible through a white light filter. 

Anyway, its not designed for imaging because its nearly impossible to get a camera's chip close enough to the focal plane.  However, for anyone interested it is possible to do: you need to add a Barlow lens to your image train.  I actually used a 5x powermate last Sunday and got some absolutely stunning images of flares and prominences.  If your interested in the sun, this is really the best way to look at it without spending thousands of dollars. 

 

One of the things I found most interesting about these pictures was when I compared them to my earlier attempts.  Its nice to know that I'm actually getting more proficient at using my camera and telescopes.

 Not only do the new pictures show more solar detail but they are also taken with larger format camera and almost at a size I could print.

M51

M51 and the new Edge

Over the course of 2 days I spent close to 16 hours on Mount Seymour stargazing.  A significant portion of that was used to image M51 and the M57 to try and test out the optics on my new Edge 11" telescope.  Unfortunately I also noticed that my motorized focuser kicked the bucket so I now either need to repair or replace it; focusing a SCT with the standard mirror control is unbelievably frustrating.  Anyway, M51 presented me with a great opportunity to compare the quality of my old Celestron 8" with my new 11" because just a few months before I imaged M51 with the old scope.  And as an added bonus I even have an image of M51 through my Televeue 85 mm.

The two SCT telescopes imaged M51 for about the same amount of time so the images are pretty easy to compare. 

M51 through Edge 11" - 12 x 5 min

M51 through Celestron 8" - 15 x 3 min

M51 through 85 mm Televue 12 x 3 min

Comparing these shots I'm definitely the most impressed with the Edge, but it is also the scope that needs the most work to use.  Its bigger, which makes it more difficult to set up (and the mount is quite a challenge to physically move when polar aligning).  The longer focal length also means it needs to be better focused, which is why my motor focuser really needs to be fixed.  I'm quite excited about the prospects of continued imaging through it!

The Super Moon

I don't know why but for some reason the media really picked up on the full moon this month.  Because the full moon occurs when the moon is at perigee (its closest point to Earth) its called a 'super moon', but really its not that special.  This particular lunar configuration happens quite often and it would be really difficult to spot the 15% increase in size. I was quite interested in setting up my new telescope (an 11" SCT on a EQ6 mount) and testing it out.  Because I was just working the kinks out of the new setup I didn't really want to drag it all the way up the mountain so I chose a community league parking lot close to my house.  My plan was to take some shots of the moon and then try a Light Pollution Reducing filter and see how things in the city worked out.  Unfortunately I made a little mistake; I never labelled which filter was which in my filter wheel and ended up doing all the imaging through a narrowband OIII filter. Sadly, the result was not good.

The moon however turned out quite nicely!