Saturday 4 February 2017

AR12629 in Ha 4th February

Seems the turn of february is a tipping point for me with the sun just about above most of the tree tops for most of the morning, following 3 months of grabbing quick views of suns between the branches.  With blue skies prevailing I decided to give the Daystar Quark its first run of the year on the back of the Skywatcher ED80.  Seeing was awful so decided to use 2x2 binning on the PGR (FLIR) Chameleon 3 camera to give effective 6.9um pixel size, which, together with increased sensitivity and shorter exposure time just about did the job.  Bear in mind the sun was still below 20 degrees altitude in the sky.  The sun is pretty quiet at the moment with this relict active region heading towards the limb really the main feature of note.  I needed to use flats with this image as there were dust bunnies galore - I need to clean all my glassware before settling into the 2017 solar season proper.