Astro Imaging in the UK

The sun came out in February – I have proof 🙂

There was an amazing filament – it was at least 25 times the size of the planet earth! A stunning sight!

Taken through the PST with the DMK21 and 2x Barlow.

The Dumbbell Nebula (M27 or NGC6853) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1,360 light years. The Nebula is around 10,000 years Old and is around 1 Ly across.

This object was the first planetary nebula to be discovered; by Charles Messier in 1764. At its brightness of visual magnitude 7.5 and its diameter of about 8 arcminutes, it is easily visible in binoculars, and a popular observing target by amateurs.

This image was one of the first images taken through the loaned FLT98. Taken with a Starlight Xpress H9 mono CCD, through a WO FLT98 and 7nm Ha filter. 12 x 20 minute exposures.

There are some lovely Active Regions around at the moment… some small proms as well.

This is Active Region 11543 – this is the same region in differing frequencies…

Here are some more images from last weekend. Usual set-up, usual processing. Click on the images for a larger version.

This is a three pane mosaic showing just the Proms.

This image shows the effect of the different end of the frequency range of the PST.

And lastly most of the activity was in one central band, so I took half a dozen movies and created a mosaic strip.

Saw a great piece of processing on SGL a few weeks ago and just had to try myself. This involved inverting the Prom portion of a solar image so that there is a white background and then colourising… very odd, but strangely appealing!

From 28th July 20112

I sat out in the sun taking AVIs every 5 minutes for nearly 6 hours. I even managed to cook a bbq while doing it 🙂

This is the end result of 54.2Gb of date captured over 6 hours, I used a different capture program this time, called “Dave’s Solar System recorder” – still getting to grips with that, but a lot of potential.

Each AVI was stacked in AVI stacker, wavelets in R5 and further processing in CS5. I then used “Dave’s video stabilizer”. Don’t know who Dave is but he writes cracking software 🙂

Had a nice sunny weekend and managed to get out with the scope on both Saturday and Sunday. The plan for Saturdays was a complete ring of fire… But I missed a bit 🙂

17gb of data 20 AVI’s. Usual software… Captured using IC Capture, stacked in AVIStack, wavelets in R5 and colour/levels/curves in CS5.

Click on the images to biggerise them!

Another image of AR1520, same as previous details – just slightly further around the disc…

AR1520 in Ha.

Using AVIStack I have no idea if it uses all the frames, or a certain percentage… or if it uses bits from everyone. Whatever it does it seems to do quite well.

I still use Registax for wavelets, although that’s just laziness as I haven’t learnt to use then in AVI Stack yet! This is AR1520 the same region that NASA has been following and taking some spectacular images. Here is one of mine…

Scope: PST
Camera: DMK21 (with barlow element to get focus)
Stack: AVI Stack
Process: Registax/CS5