Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

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AndrevdHoeven
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Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by AndrevdHoeven »

Hi everybody,

I already posted two images, but I thought it would be nice to introduce myself on the forum a bit. I'm André van der Hoeven and I'm a 36 years old high-school physics teacher in the Netherlands. I studied aerospace engineering and physics in Delft University. Since my 4th year I'm already interested in astronomy, but only 2 years ago I started with astronomy as a hobby. In April 2010 I bought my first telescope, a C11 and shortly after that started with astrophotography. Since that time I tried to develop my techniques and I like to photograph all kinds of objects, ranging from sun, moon, planets to deepsky and even detection of exoplanets. An overview of my imaging results can be found on my website:

www.astro-photo.nl

I'm active in an astronomical society in Alblasserdam here. With this society we designed and built a solar heliostat in the last two years.

A heliostat consists of two mirrors, one of which has a more or less fixed position and a second mirror that follows the sun along its path over the sky. The light is send by these two mirrors through a fixed refractor that focuses the light and projects it onto a special projection table in a darkened room.



This was quite a big effort of a large group of people who have spent quite some time in making this special instrument possible. I was one of the members of this group. The optical flat mirrors were made in Belgium by a member of the Volksuniversiteit Gent who spent a lot of time in grinding and polishing these mirrors with 1/4 lambda. He's working now on even better mirrors as we speak.

About 4 months ago we had a first light of the heliostat and were astonished to see granulation, sunspots lightbridges and faculae on a 1 m projection...

Here's an image of the heliostat outside:



Inside the projection room where the light which has passed through a Meade 178 refractor is projected on the projection table:



And a first result (just a quick shot with a phone, so it doesn't show the image as good as it looks in reality):



Currently we are working on further improvement of the mirrors and receiving the first images. One of the possible plans is to do spectroscopy in the future with this setup. But that's still far from being reality.

Portfolio

Here I will my favourite solar images of last year. All these images are made using an ED80 or ED110 with a Lunt Herschel prism in combination with a Baader Solar continuum filter and a DMK21.







TMB92/Lunt Herschel/Solar continuum

Lunt 60/BF1200 - LS75Tha etalon
earl

Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by earl »

very nice work. Love the heliostat.


Pedro

Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by Pedro »

Welcome André. Very interesting homebuild heliostat. I also enjoyed your high quality lunar images in your blog.

best


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swisswalter
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Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by swisswalter »

Hi André

welcome to that wonderful TOS free site. Thank you for that introduction. Fine setup you have there


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Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by marktownley »

Excellent setup and a great overview of how it all works! Thanks :)


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Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by Merlin66 »

Very well done!
Looks like you have a great teaching set up there...
When you want to install a spectrohelioscope/ spectroscope in the beam after the Meade refractor...let me know, I can help.


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Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by Montana »

What a wonderful introduction :) that heliostat looks fabulous!! Also your images are really very beautiful too :)

Regards
Alexandra


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Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by alex »

Great work!!


Bill E.

Re: Introduction, portfolio and our society homebuild heliostat...

Post by Bill E. »

B) All that is too cool. Thanks for sharing with us.


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