Category: Solar

Observing Session: A Week of Solar Sketching 21-27, June

A discussion at our last astronomy club meeting had me thinking it would be fun to try sketching the Sun over a period of time. As luck would have it,  I had made a sketch earlier that afternoon, so decided to give it a go for a week. All observations were made using the TMB 80 refractor and a Delos 10mm eyepiece @ 48x. I did try using the R.C  but found the TMB’s image…


Observing Session: 14, June

I’m really pissed off at the moment! For the last 10 days or so, we’ve had a pretty good streak of reasonably clear skies. The big problem is that  by the time it’s dark enough – about midnight – I’m so pooped that my bed is a more attractive proposition than the observatory 🙁 Even if I wasn’t, the full Moon blazing away, killed any faint glimmer of enthusiasm that I could muster 🙁…


Observing Session: 1, September

Image courtesy of SOHO After an awful weekend over the last Bank holiday, the weather seems to have settled down a bit and I was able to open up on Saturday afternoon and see what the sun was up to.  A quick peek the week before, was very dissapointing,  but yesterday saw lots of activity.Here’s the entry from my observing log. Way hay. My first log using Skytools 3!! Way to go.Principle groups are…


Observing Session 19, August

 Image courtesy of SOHO and NASA The forecast for Sunday was solid cloud with possible rain. What we got was pretty much the opposite, but not after a little frustration to begin with.  I made the following log entry. Observation Started 10:58 UT  Seeing: Variable over session. Transparency: Variable over session.Going for a gap in the clouds. By the time we opened up and got set up – less than 5 mins, there was almost complete…


What's that Blue Stuff?

Well I was about to write that it’s been at least 3 weeks since it’s been clear enough to go out and observe, but I was wrong. My log shows the last clearish night we had was on the 24th June. Either way, it seems like an age since I looked through an eyepiece. Even during the day, the weather has been awful recently, but this morning the sky had larger bits of blue…


Sunspots 1482, 1484, 1486

 Finally had some time to spend on some data that we took on the afternoon of the 21st. Taken through the  250mm RC using the Nikon D5100 DSLR. We took a couple of minutes of video, but find that Registax 6 won’t load any more than about 1450 tif files for processing.  Of the 3000 odd frames takes, I chose frames 1000 thru to 2399 and processed these. As with my terrestrial processing, you…