Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

Today I completed the protective cap for the front of the scope and took the completed scope to the Fairwood observatory.

Here it is on the EQ3-2 mount with the protective caps on:


And with the caps off:


This is the scope stowed inside the observatory with the protective caps for the eyepiece and objective in place:


Hopefully this scope will be used by observers not wishing to open up the dome and use the full aperture solar filter for the LX200 SCT.

Steve Wainwright

Following our vacating of the Marina Towers, the SAS has had to change their letterhead (because the tower appeared on the old one)

The new letterhead shown above was developed by Daniel Spinks (son of our chairman, Brian Spinks)

I modified a 70mm F/700 refractor by fitting a Thousand Oaks black polymer solar filter permanently in front of the objective lens (to remove the filter, two screws have to be removed, so there is no danger of the filter falling off during an observing session). An ideal eyepiece focal length is 20mm-25mm giving a view of the full disk. I have included a 20mm eyepiece with the scope. I have fitted the scope with a solar finder for the rapid and safe acquisition of the Sun. This scope is ideal for fitting on the EQ3-2 mount at Fairwood.

The 70mm Fairwood Solar refractor


In between clouds today I was able to test the scope visually and two ways photographically.
Fortunately there was a large sunspot group AR1057 and a small sunspot AR1059 on the Sun.
First, a handheld afocal photograph taken with a digital compact camera was able to reveal both sunspots:
Afocal image of the Sun through the Fairwood Solar refractor

Clouds interfered but the test was a success and shows that members can record sunspots with a suitable compact camera.
Then I placed a DMK USB2.0 camera at the prime focus and stacked the best 2000 frames of AR1057. The frames were stacked in Registax4 to produce the final image.

AR1057 through the Fairwood Solar refractor

Visually the scope shows the Sun as a pleasant yellow.

Wayne Jones captured this image of the Sun with AR1057 and AR1059 using a monochrome Mintron video camera and his 130mm F/900mm Newtonian fitted with a Baader solar filter. The image has been colourised:


Steve Wainwright

This image is the same image of the Horsehead Nebula but has been reprocessed:


Anne Startup

Green light is in the middle of the visible spectrum and is a very stable region in which do white light imaging.
An f/5 6" refractor was fitted with a photo grade Baader solar filter (not safe for eyepiece work) and the DMK camera was fitted with a Baader green continuum filter and a x2 Barlow.
The best 3000 frames out of a total of 5000 were stacked in registax to produce the final image.

AR1057 in Green Continuum light

The umbras and penumbras were very clear and there were a number of pores around the spots.

Steve Wainwright

H-alpha and Ca K-Line PSTs were used with a DMK camera.

On Sunday night a 6" F/5 Achromatic refractor was mounted on the Fairwood EQ3-2 polar aligned mount. DVD was captured with red, green and blue filters at each of 256, 64 and 32 frame accumulations. The Mintron camera also had stacked light pollution and UV/IR cut filters. Opticstar RGB filters and a manual filter wheel were used.


The different images for each colour channel and each level of frame accumulation were stacked in Registax. Then the colour channels were combined using Andrew Sprott's CAP (Colour Alignment Processor) to produce a colour image for each level of frame accumulation which was then processed for levels in the Gimp. Finally the three images for each level of frame accumulation were registered and combined in Andrew Sprott's FIC (Flexible Image Combine) to reveal all parts of the nebula. The Aspect ratio of the image was corrected in the Gimp and the final image was resized down a little.


Final RGB image of M42 & M43
Here the image has been reprocessed to show more nebulosity and to improve the colour balance:

The first two images were taken at two different image scales with a Ca K-line PST solar scope.

The next image was taken in H-alpha light with a H-alpha PST solar scope. The camera used was a DMK.

Below is a blink animation of AR1054. The blink is between H-alpha (where you can see the filaments) and Ca K-line (where you see the umbra and penumbra clearly as well as some of the chromospheric network):


Steve Wainwright

A white light image of AR 1054 taken on Sunday by Wayne Jones.

He used his monochrome Mintron video camera on his 130mm F/900mm Newtonian with a home made Baader solar filter.

The image has been processed and colourised in the Gimp.

Friday night saw a clear night for the first part of the evening.

Instruments being used were: 20 x 100 giant binoculars (Colin), a 10" Newtonian (Don), C6 SCT & Mintron with colour filters (Steve), 12" LX200 with a DFK camera (Derek). Wayne joined us for the last half hour.

Mars, Saturn and M42 were the main subjects for observation and imaging.

Here is another RGB image of the Orion Nebula captured with a Mintron on the C6 SCT:


Derek with the LX200 SCT obtained these images from 1600 and 1000 captured frames respectively. A DFK camera with a 1.6 focal extender was used:

Saturn

Saturn was very low in the sky and slightly affected by the incoming clouds



Mars


Mars was high in the sky so the images were much less affected by the seeing conditions due to elevation.



Steve Wainwright

Our Society lecture last night was titled "In Search of the Northern Lights" which was given by Dave Tovey of our Society. Thank you to Dave for sharing his experiences in Norway, it looked fantastic there!

Gaynor Thomas and Steve Wainwright made a quick visit to the Fairwood Observatory on Sunday afternoon.

I had some help with our first experiments on RGB imaging with an MTV-22S85HC-EX monochrome 1/2" chip Mintron. Wayne Jones, new member of the Swansea Astronomical Society, used his 130mm F:900mm Newtonian on a driven equatorial mount. He used Red Green and Blue simple colour filters that are not designated for RGB imaging but which have good characteristics of filtering out the other colours.