I have been tumbling through astrophotography for just a few months, and solar for just a few weeks. Quarks and similar are quite out of budget for now, but I have the pleasure of borrowing a modest Solarmax 40 from a family member.
Since I am an avid builder of telescopes, I may (with extreme caution/camera only) explore the DIY section here. Anyway, happy to have found a community of solar imagers. Here are the fruits of my first few weeks of viewing and imaging:
The primary focus is on the timelapse I have of an enormous (1/5 radius) prominence. (bigger version) I also have a range of shots of this event and recent interesting solar discs. Standouts are the extremely active discs (inverted and standard) from Thursday when I was taking this. (Below). I have been looking at the sun for a long time, and have never seen it as interesting and dynamic as this day.
Taken from 5 to 6pm CDT, from somewhere around Houston - 4/18/24. I had been watching live feeds religiously for weeks looking for a large prominence peeling away. Finally, I see one - but it's cloudy. I walk outside and for once, find the forecast is a bit off; there is clarity towards sunset. I am dungeonmastering in 30 minutes, so I have my headset on, exclaiming in a group call as I sit in my driveway -- legs off the culvert, an aluminet draped over an ornamental tree to cover self and computer. Mosquitos and fire ants were killed over this data acquisition, 300 gigabytes of data paid for in bites and sweat - fifteen thousand frames.
I had not initially set out to capture this timelapse. My laptop battery is quite finite, and I had no idea exactly how much the prominences move on the scale of minutes. My goal was to capture the fixin's for mosaics, with enough input frames to avoid the off-axis performance loss intrinsic to most HA scopes - at two different image scales (Prime and TV barlow 3x, spaced for 1.5x). So that meant four or six panel mosaics. I kept coming back to the prominence, however (turns out on average, every five minutes or so) for redundancy. I really wanted to nail such a transient phenomenon. It was only after processing every sub-interval that I saw:
1. There is significant movement along the prominence even on the span of minutes
2. I had 8 spaced out captures of the prominence (albeit at 4 different combinations of gain and image scale)
Acquisition details: Coronado Solarmax40 -- old HA scope, a bit better than the modern coronado PST. 0.7 angstrom instead of 1.
QHY5iii715c planet cam. This cam does exceedingly well at solar, due to the very tiny pixels and high resolution. Seeing was quite poor, reflected in lost sharpness versus other captures - but other captures did not have this level of solar activity.
Crudely tracked on a modified az GTI mount
I parfocalized the cam with a 10mm eyepiece, just very handy to reach focus visually first - or on this day, helps show my neighbors the view without upsetting camera focus.
It has been a fun if exhausting ordeal to learn tasteful and proper processing; I still have a way to go. The scope is of course, a little finnicky - sweet spots, dealing with the vignette, finding ideal tuning etc.
