First CaK with my new 40mm mask 3/29/2023

[rigel123]

I had made a mask from foam board and duck tape just to test the difference and really liked the better contrast and sharpness of the details so went to a local company here in Mason, OH, Arrow-3D Printing ( www.arrow-3d.com ) and Chris put together a much nicer solution and it works great! I think it is a nice touch to the Orion ED80T CF

Original mask

Original-mask.jpg (126.98 KiB) Viewed 443 times

New mask (showing two small felt pads that work great to keep the mask snug)

3D-Mask.jpg (130.08 KiB) Viewed 443 times

Mask on the scope

New-Mask-for-ED80T.jpg (179.99 KiB) Viewed 443 times

Full Disk (taken with a bit of contrail but the sun was out!)

FD-CaK-3-29-2023.jpg (296.2 KiB) Viewed 443 times

[Petrus]

Nice capture and good-looking aperture mask (the new one, hehe)!

[rigel123]

Thanks Petrus! I agree, the new one adds a lot more class!

[DeepSolar64]

That new mask works well! That’s a very nice CaK image!

[marktownley]

Very nice Warren. Amazing the difference stopping down in CAK makes - reduced spherical aberration, better samplimg at the camera chip and more resilience to seeing.

[davidem27]

I experienced the whole same thing with my Borg 76 ED and Lunt CaK module B1200.
It seems that those modules work better at > f/9
With native f/6.5, I got many blurry edges on full discs and unsharped images.
As I put a mask of 50 and 40 mm, I got so much better results!

[Averton]

In Oz there are some people that say that what you can't do with duct tape, baling twine, fencing wire and an angle grinder isn't worth doing
However, in this case the second aperture mask is certainly a professional looking effort!
A very nice image worthy of the new piece of kit

[Carbon60]

Nice result with your reduced aperture setup, Warren.

Stu.

[ffellah]

Good job with the mask, Warren. The Calcium looks great. What camera ?

Franco

[rigel123]

Thanks everyone for the comments! I used my ASI174MM Franco. I’ll probably try it with my 2X barlow today to see how it performs in closeups

[arnedanielsen]

In Oz there are some people that say that what you can't do with duct tape, baling twine, fencing wire and an angle grinder isn't worth doing
However, in this case the second aperture mask is certainly a professional looking effort!
A very nice image worthy of the new piece of kit

We usually say that if it can't bee fixed with duct tape you haven't used enough duct tape. :-)

Best regards,
Arne

[christian viladrich]

Great result ! The image is very sharp.