Dec 16th Stacked while light image

[Baurice]

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Philip Pugh
This nearly never happened. Even in southern England, the late autumn and early winter sun never gets very far above the horizon. I managed to line it up from our back garden, only to find that half of the solar disc was hidden behind the roof of a nearby house. I had to cart the assembled Maksutov, camera and remote shutter control to the front of the house, hurting my back in the progress. In truth, as I’m not good sat lying, I nearly gave up when it look about 10 minutes to get my first image. That caused its own problems, as the Sun was less than 3 weeks away from its closest approach to Earth, and almost completely filled the field of view.



Fortunately, the sunspots on view in the camera viewfinder made all the hassle worthwhile, especially as the weather forecast for the forseeable future was cloud and rain, suggesting that I had probably a long wait for a similar shot.



I used my normal settings of 1540mm focal length and ISO 100 but used a slightly longer exposure of 1/400 second (instead of the usual 1/500 second), as there was some low haze in the otherwise clear blue sky.

It was a proof of concept, too, as I used Autostakkert to stack 20 full disc shots.

[Makuser]

Hi Philip. A very nice solar sunspots image in white light using your Mak-Cass telescope. And despite the changing calculus of decisions facing you, you still came away with a nice capture with Autostakkert. Lots of active regions and plages are visible. Thanks for sharing this latest work with us Philip and keep them coming.

[messier 111]

Nice take, thx.