Getting ready for the Annular Solar eclipse

[AstroBee]

26 days to go for the annular eclipse. Today was my first day off work in a while and it happened to coincide with decent weather so I decided to set up my rig in the backyard and test my gear. Here's a few pics of my setup and I'll explain what the gear is below.


First the gear list and then the lessons learned today.
Gear:
Lunt 80mm Double-Stacked Ha scope with a ZWO 1600mm camera and Hinode Solar Guider to guide the mount.
Explore Scientific ED 152 with a ZWO2600mm camera and Baader ASTF 140 white-light filter.
The two scopes are riding on an ADM side-by-side rig on my iOptron CEM70EC mount.

Lessons Learned:
1. Yes, the CEM70 can easily handle the roughly 60lbs of gear for solar tracking.
2. My underpowered i3 NUC with only 8GB of RAM cannot handle running the OS, mount, Hinode guider, TeamViewer and two instances of SharpCapPro at the same time.
3. I had two solar filters for my ES152 to try out. A Thousand Oaks solar filter that shows a yellow-orange more natural looking image and the Baader ASTF that shows a white image. There was no comparison in the image quality between the two filters with the Baader winning hands down.
4. The 2600MM and MC are both horrible choices for full disk solar imaging. The frame-rate is just too slow. even with the ROI of 3500x3500 I was only able to get around 3.5fps. As an example, my 1600mm on the 80mm Lunt I use an ROI of 1600x1600 and can reach around 45fps with it.
5. I would think shooting with the MM mono camera would show a better image than the MC color camera but I'm hard-pressed to see a difference between the two. Oddly, the image scale seems a bit different between the two for some reason.

Here are three sample pics.
#1 Thousand Oaks filter & 2600MC, best 20 of 100 frames stacked.


#2 Baader filter & 2600MC, best 20 of 100 frames stacked.


#3 Baader filter & 2600MM mono, best 20 of 100 frames stacked.


So my final thoughts and take-aways from today's test are this.
Yes, I can use the single mount for my captures, which will save space for my travel to the centerline. Not that big a deal for the annular eclipse since I'm only driving 4 hours north to get on the path. But for next April's total eclipse I'll be drive 2 days, half-way across the country, so saving space/weight will be a good thing.

I don't have much experience in imaging the Sun in white-light. I've read about people using a solar continuum filter and curious what people think about them. Will they improve the contrast or sharpness on my white-light rig?

Thanks ~ Greg

[StarHugger]

Wow nice images and Eclipse config, the setup looks well capable indeed.

Best of luck, I wont see much up here in WI but will be at my scopes either way.

[SkyHiker]

Very nice gear! Is this setup meant for the solar eclipse, or non-eclipse solar work? I would think that solar eclipse work would be more like recording a time lapse with one image per 10 seconds or so. Or do you want to record the entire eclipse at a high frame rate?

You are right about the 2600. At 3500x3500 it has to run at full resolution rate, looking at the table in the manual. You should be able to get 13 fps at 1920x1080. At 640x480 it should be able to do 28 fps, which I wanted to try next on Saturn. At 320x240 it runs quite fast (Ekos said 200 Hz while the manual says 51 fps).

I discovered that my new guide cam QHY5III200M can do 65 fps at 16 bit, 96.5 fps at 8 bit, same resolution 1920x1080. Christopher Go and Tiziano Olivetti used it on planets with good results. I paid $309 for it, and it produces lots of guide stars with its IR sensitivity. Something like that might work for solar.

[messier 111]

very nice setup and place also nice images , thx .

[Solsearcher]

Nice setup Greg , better to find the weak link now rather than in the field during the shoot .
I will be looking forward to seeing what you catch .