I enjoy shooting the Sun in white light with my Baader OD 5.0 solar film, Celestron C80-HD
A few weeks ago I ordered a Baader Solar Continuum filter (single cell) from BHPhotoVideo on March 31st to hopefully get some more detail on spots and feculae. That proved to be a good purchase that showed up exactly a week later; at least from what I can see so far. Of course, when it arrived so did the clouds, and in the last week the Sky has been decent but the spots are few and quite small.
Today, AR's 2993 and 94 are coming around the limb, and they are quite large at the moment. Naturally, today was 3C (37F) outside, and tomorrow we're expecting a few CM's (~inch) of snow. Why did that happen?
Probably because I went to pick up today a sheet of A4 Baader OD 3.8 solar film. Not for visual, strictly for
First, I tried getting it in Canada. Every single Ontario telescope/camera shop, nope. OK, I called La Maison de l'Astronomie in Quebec; this is where I bought my Baader 5.0 film. No, none in, don't know when or even if ever! Something about the French Quebecois that makes it seem more final than it may be... I'm from Montreal and speak Quebecois, so I can say that Next, DavidAstro, also out of Quebec. Le meme chose (same thing). So, next country.... My friends south of the border.
I searched, and came up blank. OK, so where is this available? I checked Baader's web site. Well, should have done that in the first place. I quote, "This product is currently not available in the US". I'll take that as all of North America
Alright, so off to Europe. Long story short, I found it at Optics Pro.com for just over $43CDN. I ordered that on April 2nd, and looked at shipping choices. Random carrier was a little over half the price of DHL, but I want to get it in one piece and this year. So there's another $31 and change CDN. Five days later I get an email from DHL about duty. Seriously? Arrgh! So there's another 4 cents short of 25 bucks spent.
I'm a solar-head, obviously. My A4 (roughly 8 1/2 X 11) sheet of this costed me $99.62CDN That's 79 USD, 61 GBP, and 107 AUD. If I've left out your currency, my apologies; all available on XE.com.
I am looking forward to this, regardless of price. Solar ain't cheap, especially these days...!!! I'll make a filter in the next day or so with the film; the cardboard it was shipped in is going to be used for it
All in German; the only English here is "lucky imaging"; which is what it is
French, English, German, Spanish:
Wednesday might be good weather-wise, I'll see where I'm at. Time to eat dinner and plan for the next couple of days!
Have a good day/night all!