A quick sun test with a color(!) cam

[Gingerfish]

Wow, I did not expect any of this to work! But it did!

1) Color cams suck, and the IMX183 is bad for solar.

I fully expected this to be true! But when you bin 2x2, you lose color and end up with "mono". Althought the image is noisy, I did not see any grid problems. Of course, with a bigger sensor, the sweet spot is smaller. But that was expected.

2) BAD newton rings when Barlowing!

Considering how BAD the asi120 NR's, I expected the same - or worse here! But no. No tilt adapter was used!

3) A 1" sensor + Lunt B400 = baaaaaad vignetting!

I know I am using a 3x barlow, but wow I did NOT expect this! Should I even bother looking for a bigger blocking filter?

I still need to fix a couple of things. I had moved the focuser on the donor scope out 22mm, and I did not spot this until I was done. So I can hopefully get a bit more out of the etalon!

The QHY183c is a heavy beast, so there is some droop. If I can sort this out, the sweet spot should be better centered.

All in all, I am happy! I was going to get a new camera, but now I might wait.

[DeepSolar64]

That last one turned out really nice!!

[rcwinter]

Considering what you advised, I like them, congrats , great effort. Richard

[Gingerfish]

Thanks!

Yes, my best image so far!

[Gingerfish]

Here is a quick animation of the 17 images I got.

[marktownley]

Came out ok against the odds. Try sharpening with fewer iterations to reduce image noise.

[Gingerfish]

Thanks you! I think most of it is "gif noise", as the .avi doesn't have it. But I don't want to upload a 1 sec vid :p

[solarnoob]

Great progress, thanks for sharing.

Frank

[MAURITS]

Well done.

[Montana]

Wow!! well done the animation is brilliant!

Alexandra

[Radon86]

Very interesting Gingerfish/Chris,
What file format did you record in, 8 or 16 bit, AVI or SER, Sharpcap or Firecapture.
It would be interesting to see if you did not bin, and just extract about 50 image files (the best quality) as .tiff files, then extract the red channel from that and see if you can stack those...
Where can I find out about your solarscope (LuntAltair scope ??), impressive images.

[Gingerfish]

Thank you all!

Boso36,
I use SharpCap, 8 bit, and I think it defaulted to .SER files. I bin for two reasons. Because I use a 3x Barlow, binning 2x2 gives me a nice resolution of 0.46"/pixel. Unbinned gives me a resolution of 0.23"/pixel. which is WAY overkill for my seeing. The second reason was to avoid grid artifacts.

The mod is simple enough, a stage 1 I think they call it. I copied this:

https://imagesofoursun.wordpress.com/eq ... o-triplet/