Hi there,
I himmed and hawed about buying a dedicated solar telescope for over a year - and asked many questions on forums during that span. I had been considering the PST and the Lunt 50mm, but the real apple of my eye was the Coronado SolarMax 60. But I always backed away from that one...it was too much. How could I justify spending so much for an OTA that can only observe one object? Since I had the chance to see beautiful red prominences during totality back in August, this temptation had gotten harder to resist.
Well, I awoke Friday morning to read an email announcing Meade's sale on most of their Coronado scopes. 30% off! This was the permission I'd been waiting for. I could buy the SolarMax for no more than a double stack PST! By that afternoon, I had placed my order: A SolarMax 60 single stack with 15mm blocking filter from High Point!
It arrived Wednesday around 1:30, and we somehow avoided the "new gear curse". Our usual cloudy skies cleared up for about 2 hours. All I can say is "WOW"! What a sight! My 6-year-old put it best when he finally got his little eye focused on a beautiful prominence: "Daddy that is awesome! This is definitely the coolest thing I've seen in a telescope!"
Never content with visually observing, I had to grab my laptop and throw my ASI224MC into the diagonal. I know that monochrome is preferable, but one large purchase at a time, please. The first thing I'll say about this is that it's REALLY hard to see the image on my laptop screen in daylight, even with a blanket thrown over my head an the screen. I wonder if there's an accessibility setting in Windows 10 that might increase the contrast and make fine focus easier. Lucky for me, the recently quiet chromosphere was displaying a nice filament that gave me something to zero-in on. (I followed the quite logical advice from one of the many YouTube tutorials and did my etalon tuning first visually, and then left it alone after inserting the camera)
A big thank you to Marty Wise, whose tutorial I found especially helpful. For the most part, I was able to follow it all the way through from capture, to stacking, to post-processing in Photoshop.
Here are the results of my First Light, along with a few gear photos. Thanks for reading!
Damien
First Light! - SM60
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First Light! - SM60
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- mattwastell
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Re: First Light! - SM60
Congratulations - a worthy spend foe sure. Now we just need to wait for some real action!
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Re: First Light! - SM60
Looks good
Robert
Robert
images and animations http://tinyurl.com/h5bgoso
2024 images https://www.flickr.com/photos/69734017@ ... 0313830045
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ED80. ED100. Celestron-150mm-PST mod. C8 edge. ES127
LS60PT-LS60F-B1200. B600-Cak. PGR-Ch3-IMX265
2024 images https://www.flickr.com/photos/69734017@ ... 0313830045
2023 images https://www.flickr.com/photos/69734017@ ... 0304905278
ED80. ED100. Celestron-150mm-PST mod. C8 edge. ES127
LS60PT-LS60F-B1200. B600-Cak. PGR-Ch3-IMX265
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Re: First Light! - SM60
Congratulations Damien on the new scope and the happy kids! Great disk. I also used Marty’s tutorial. He packs a lot of info into that video. Great resource for us newbs. Clear skies!
Christopher
"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which 'are' there.". -Feynman
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Re: First Light! - SM60
Fantastic!! the best bit was " Daddy this is awesome" hopefully the next generation of space scientists
Beautiful picture too, you will not regret getting a solar scope, every view is amazing
Alexandra
Beautiful picture too, you will not regret getting a solar scope, every view is amazing
Alexandra
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Re: First Light! - SM60
Nice new toy! Glad the kids love it too. You'll all have lots of fun with it.
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