More Solar Imaging... night imaging to come!

 

Taken with a monochrome 5 megapixel camera on an 8" SCT Meade LX200GPS with a Baader solar filter and a 2X Barlow len.s

Of these two groups, AR3697 is the returning sunspot group that caused the major aurora event earlier this month. Here's where they were loacted on the solar disk (from spaceweather.com):

 

New Sunspot Group 3685 & 3686 with potential for major activity!

New and active sunspot group 3685 & 3686 captured at 9:30am today, May 18, 2024, with the help of my grandson, Anthony!

Taken with Meade LX200GPS 8", Baader whilte light filter, 5 mp grayscale camera. Captured with Sharpcap, post-processed with AS!3, Luminar, Gimp.

This sunspot group has the potential to create more auroras!

Round Two on Huge Sunspot Group 3664 and 3668

 Plugging the monochrome camera into a faster USB port and doing some manual "dithering" while creating the video seemed to really improve the quality of my capture of 3664 and 3668:

Data of Capture:
Meade 8" SCT (LX200GPS) at prime focus
Baader white light filter
Point Grey Grasshopper monochrome 5mp camera
Captured with Sharpcap
Best 5% of 2000 frames at about 80/fps
Post-process in AutoStakkert!3, Luminar 2018 and Mac Preview

Huge Sunspot Group - 3664 and 3668

 This is one of the largest sunspot groups this year! Awesome

The Omega Centauri Globular Star Cluster

I headed out last night about 10 pm last night and looked due south above the horizon.

I was able to see this beauty of the spring sky with ordinary binoculars: 

                    Omega Centauri globular star cluster!  

It appeared to be just a fuzzy patch of light but this is what it looks like

with one of my smaller telescopes (80mm f/6 480mm scope and Canon T3i camera body)

It is a stack of 30 - 5 second images at iso 3200.

Stacked in Affinity Photo and post processed with Luminar 2018.

FYI:  it's apparent size through a binocular is LARGER than the apparent size of the Moon through the same binocular... just much dimmer!