With solar activity peaking, I did not want to wait to some future date to dive into solar imaging--and as one gets older one wonders how long one has, will I make it to the next solar cycle. And further, I thought that imaging day and night might double my productivity, not realizing of course that with clouds and all, two times zero is still zero.

The lead time for my Lunt was about 4 months as promised (thanks to the Lunt team for getting it to me on schedule), so now my Lunt LS60MT/BT1200 has arrived. Of course, there followed the required 7 days without a minute of usable sunlight, but I was expecting that, happens every time I get new equipment...

My thought in getting a dedicated solar telescope was to enable a solar eclipse every clear day. So for my first go, I tried for a simulated solar eclipse theme. I wanted to be true to what I was capturing, so I found the conversion for Halpha at 656 nm as RGB=255,0,0. I had calculated I might just get the full disk in with my ASI120MM-S, but it turned out I was just not able to get it all in. So I did a composite in two images. Each image was taken at 16 bits stacked in Autostakkert at 200 frames at 3X drizzle, taking 25% of the original 800. I then used Registax wavelets, followed by the combination and color in Photoshop. About 200 images seemed to give me great S/N, so I think that was about right. Using fewer images did not help, better quality was outweighed by worse S/N.

I had really just hoped I could see something at first go--the sun at this time of year is really low here in southern Canada, barely over my neighbors houses when I took this in the AM, seeing was average, and I had little clue how to focus or adjust the Ha filter. Further there was a lot of haze. But I have to say I was blown away by the result from my new Lunt, it was really super easy to use for a rank novice!

I am so looking forward to a higher sun and better experience with my new kit, I'm sure there is more there I can capture in the future.

Any advice is most welcome.

CS day and night everyone
Rick