I was rather lazy most of today – I only got around to trying a new set up for the PST around sunset — just a tad late. In my defence, I did go madly about town in the afternoon to look for a Le Corbusier chaise lounge (in vain, I might add), but in all honesty I simply put things off until too late. Eventually I wound up trying the Meade Electronic Eyepiece on Jupiter, but the image was too bright for the eyepiece and burned the planetary disk out completely, though the moons and a couple of nearby stars were easily visible. I switched to the Toucam and played with the settings for quite some time before finally capturing this image,

which is actually the sum of several hundred images selected from 2530 images captured as a 3-minute movie. The dot, incidentally is a much enhanced Europa. It was extremely faint in the original image and had to be processed separately from the planet. It came out blue, so I arbitrarily reduced the saturation and shifted the colour to a more neutral–but still unnatural–hue.

I’m not unhappy with the result, though I suspect the scope could do better in more skillful hands (a more focused approach, perhaps). This is the result of using only about half of the first 100 images in the sequence. It seems to be noisier but with more (perhaps illusory)detail:

Both images are based on frames captured with a Toucam II at prime focus of a William Optics FLT 110 mm (2002-2004 vintage). No correction for dark frame or flat frame.

I picked up a Coronado PST today. I stuck it onto a photographic tripod and dashed out into the back yard, but was immediately disappointed. The photographic mount was far too awkward to use as an altazimuth mount, so the first thing I will need to do is look around for something more suitable as a carry-around mount, as well as figure out some quick way of attaching the PST to the G11 OTA package. Next, the contrast was very low, and I found it very difficult to tune the filter for the best results. Of course, the mount’s problems didn’t help. The magnification of the eyepiece provided with the PST is a mere 20x, so the image is small. I would have bounced it up to a higher magnification, but the mount made that very difficult (though of course I did try it).

The sun was also very bland today – a couple of active areas were visible, but no spots at the resolution I was achieving (did I mention the mount made observing difficult?), and I saw no prominences at all.

The final major problem was the heat and light. It seems when you’re solar observing there’s a big hot ball of fire glaring down on you which makes things very uncomfortable. Next time, I’m going to do this at night when its cooler and there’s less glare.