We had clouds on Sunday, so I opted for Monday afternoon instead. That worked out great because my son stopped by and looked through my solar rig for the first time. My wife has enjoyed the views to, as always.
I am still optimizing my setup. Lots of fun and money. Last week I was using Celestron Onyx 80ED scope for white light, but its light duty Crayford focuser was struggling with the heavy solar wedge. This week I have stepped up to Stellarvue 102ED. That was a good move! SV102ED focuser has handled the Herschel wedge like it was nothing, and on top of that I got noticeable improvement in the levels of fine details and saw the granulation for the first time. The best views were achieved with Pentax XF 12mm
https://www.spaceweather.com/images2024 ... mi1898.gif
The amount of fine details was unbelievable. I have easily spent 15 minutes just looking at AR3664. It has reminded me of a tadpole.
For the Lunt
As I mentioned before the Lunt helical focuser has a short travel and many of my favorite EPs don’t reach focus. This time I came out with a set of various length extension tubes. Unfortunately, they did not help. Even the shortest one overshot required adjustment and now instead of outward I was running out of inward focuser travel. Never matter. I have a nice set of Pentax XFs and Vixen SLVs which cover needed range of EPs quite nicely.
The best view with Lunt was achieved using Pentax XF 8.5mm (41x) and it was majestic. There were many proms. One on the upper right was particularly large and looked like a vortex. There was also an arch at the top of Sun disk. A few filaments, an arch and plenty of intricate details around the sunspots were resolved within the disk.
Another great solar visual!