Sun sunday 19th broad band + red filter

[cte]

Here some pictures taken with a 120 mm astrosolar in front of a 130 mm/f7 triplet. I used a red filter to improve the seeing, which, however, was very good today. Granulation is evident but still I think the mak 180 at full aperture is more suited for hi-resolution work. Camera was the ASI 294 mono, which I did not cool this time.
After full disk, I increased the focal with a 2.5 X barlow, on some sunspot regions, seeing still allowed this and more details could be obtained.
H alfa was rich as well, but I forgot to activate the 16 bit option, so I recorded movies at mere 8 bit, so I believe they are not worth of being processed. Shame on me.

[marktownley]

Nice captures! Do you see any difference in the end result with 8bit and 16bit recordings?

[cte]

Mark, I did not notice for sure while recording Haplha, it just seemed to me that the images were kind of "flat" and uniform than what I was used to. Filaments were not standing out dark against the chromosphere , and plages were not contasting well with the rest of the chromosphere. However it was the first time I was using the daystar with the 130 mm apo + 5x powermate and an internal UV-IR cut as ERF, a little bit of a gamble, but I think the heat was managed well after all

I have to say that I was using a very long focal (about 4.5 meters) and I had no sure past references from the same setup. So maybe it also explains the low contrast I had the feeling to observe, but a lot of details were present as well. But I think that imaging is doable with this setup when seeing is good. With the 2.5 x barlow (ca. F 18) I think the contrast was lower despite a better image scale, since quarks should work optimally at F30-f35