Solar filament, sunspots, plages and prominences

I have now purchased a QHY5L-II Mono camera. New challenges come with this:

 

1. Bloody dirt on the sensor!! Apparantly you would be lucky to buy new camera without dirt. Now I did try to clean it with an aircan but it all it did was split them into little pieces, still its better than the big blotches.

 

2. Newtonian rings. This is caused by the light diffraction on the glass protection cover over the CMOS sensor. Effect is horrible.

 

So to overcome the above two problems, I allow my image capture to drift a little bit. Then, without changing the gain/exposure settings I unfocus the PST on the middle of the sun surface until all dirt and newton rings show up against a completely white unfocussed background. Autostakkert 2 can then use this as a Master Flat and eliminate the rings and dirt very effectively. And so for my first complete proccessed image, I obtained this image. Of course, I am in early stages of learning to image with this camera but I am very happy with the vast improvement in detail that it captures compared to my DSLR which I was using up until now.

 

Date: 1st July 2014

Camera: QHY5L-II Mono

Image duration: 30 secs

Prime Focal (2.5X TV Powermate )

Frames per sec: 29

OTA: Coronado PST

Mount: Nexstar Alt-Az Goto

Filters: Coronado PST

Seeing:

Wind:

Light Pollution:

 

Capture software: Sharpcap 2

Post processing: Stacking 50% best frames using Autostakker 2

levels, smart sharpen and colour filter in PS5

 

Pre-shoot prep:

 

Location: Living room window of my house in Peckham,. London

Done