Testing and using a home made electronic solar finder

The equipment used

Click on an image to get a closer view

The scope is a Stella Mira 66 ED APO refractor with a field flattener, an Altair magnetic 2" filter holder with an Altair Quadband filter. The scope was focused with a ZWO EAF. The imaging camera was an SV605MC and the scope was fitted with an ICE ND100000 solar filter.

The electronic finder comprised an SV905C CMOS camera connected to an Angeleyes solar finder by means of a barlow body.

Two instances of AstroDMx Capture were run on two different Workspaces (virtual desktops) of the Ubuntu Cinnamon Linux imaging computer.

Screenshot of the four Workspaces with two in use

The left hand workspace is running the instance with the SV605MC imaging camera. The right hand workspace is running the SV905C attached to the Angeleyes solar finder.

Screenshot of the imaging camera instance of AstroDMx Capture

Screenshot of the finder camera instance of AstroDMx Capture

The finder and the imaging scope are very well co-aligned and it was an easy matter to send the scope/mount to the Sun bring the Sun into the centre of the finder, which virtually centred the Sun in the imaging camera field of view which was set to a region of interest of 1240 x 1270. 

AstroDMx Capture was used to capture a 2000 frame SER file.

The best 50% of the frames were stacked in Autostakkert! , wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 and post processed in the Gimp 2.10 and Image Magick.

Monochrome image of the Sun August 20, 2023

Coloured solar image August 20, 2023

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin