Ausalba
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Zeiss v SDO

27/9/2011

 
The Sun has a fine group of spots making its way across the disk just now. Active region (AR) 1302 is a large group, already associated with auroral activity generated by massive emissions of solar plasma. See Spaceweather for images and information.

Today was mixed sun and cloud in Brisbane, but I took advantage of a clear spell and a moderate temperature to shoot a few more images of our closest star. Once again using the Canon 30D at prime focus on the 150mm Zeiss refractor, I made a few dozen exposures; many are needed, to ensure a few reasonably sharp ones. Bad seeing can affect all astronomical images shot through a telescope, but when the observing conditions are: inside a warm dome, on a warm day, then the turbulence can produce appalling image blur. As it happened, today was just below average for the time of year, with fairly stable seeing - possibly the best I've seen so far, from this site. Even so, exposures around 1/1500 second can still be indistinct, so I increased the ISO setting to 400 and used some exposures of 1/6000 second (as it happened, the best exposures were 1/1500 & 1/2000 second).

In the end, I had 3 usable images, from a total of around 40; I have combined them into a GIF animation. I have also compared them to today's white-light image from the SDO satellite, and was pleasantly surprised. The linked image below will take you to the full set of images.
Sunspots

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    I take photographs, sometimes with obsolete technology. I look at the night sky. I drink coffee, and whisky (Scotch, or possibly Irish). I read and sometimes write. I Tweet, occasionally (@ozalba). I might ruminate and fulminate from time to time.

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