Gallery XXXXII - 4/9-10/06
I got home fairly early from work. It was clear. Motivated by the eclipse, I decided to observe the sun in H-alpha. I saw a good prominence on 4/9 so I thought that I'd get the Phillips ToU-cam out and take a picture. I hadn't done this in a while so it turned into a production. I made a par focal EP so that I could achieve focus (using the short tube 80 to focus on the Easter bunny in front of my neighbors house). There was a fair amount of gear: lap top, Phillips web cam, two tripods, one for the Solarview 50 and one for the short tube, the par focal Eyepiece set, a USB extender cable, a shade for the lap top, other eyepieces. I still have the clubs EQ refractor (Shhh...) so I mounted the Solarview on the hand driven EQ mount to shoot with. I didn't barlow so the following was shot at prime focus at I think 1/500 or 1/1000 th of a second, manual control, 5 fps, as an AVI. I stacked/aligned with Registax 2 (I must update to 3, eh?) and then touched up in GIMP.
040910 - h alpha - Solarview 50 - Phillips ToUCam - ?1/500 sec
On the next day (4/10/046), the prominence was bigger so I thought that I'd try again. I took out the tracking platform for the 20" dob and sat a tripod with a TelVue Alt/Az "Telepod" head on it. Using my knowledge of where Polaris is relative to a tree near my driveway, I polar aligned and leveled the platform. I attached the Solarview 50 to the telepod head. So I had an Alt/Az set up on a Poncet platform. Now I had tracking. Using the par focal EP from yesterday, I focused with a 2.5x TelVue 1.25' power mate. Inserting the camera, I tuned the focus. The first image was shot at 1/250 sec, 5 fps, manual control as an AVI. They were stacked with Registax 2 and tweaked in GIMP (I don't know color). The next was shot at 1/100 sec.
041006 - h alpha - Solarview 50 - 2.5x barlow - Phillips ToUCam - 1/250 sec
041006 - h alpha - Solarview 50 - 2.5x barlow - Phillips ToUCam - 1/000 sec
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