Contains:  Solar system body or event
12/4/2020 MST Sunspots Thinning Again?, Steve Lantz

12/4/2020 MST Sunspots Thinning Again?

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

I decided to give the Takahashi E-130 a try on the sun. The telescope's optics did not disappoint, but the number of sunspots kinda did! The sun should be coming out of the sunspot minimum, but apparently it forgot today. Sunspots 2785 and 2786 are disappearing around the sun's trailing limb and 2790 is heading toward the central meridian, but that's it. I used a 1.25" luminance filter and a 1.25" H-alpha filter and took 20s video exposures at about 38 frames per second. I had two videos with a particularly large number of good frames and chose to stack 30 frames from each of two 740 frame sets. I wasn't sure if the E-130 would be well suited for solar work since it is principally a wide-field astrograph, but I was pleasantly surprised by the image sharpness.

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12/4/2020 MST Sunspots Thinning Again?, Steve Lantz