There were a few relatively clear minutes around the Sun today, so the new gear, ASI 178MM (cooled), Lunt CaK B600 LS6CAKMDS2, Skywatcher 72/420 ED-APO, mountpusher, EQ3-mod got its chance to gather its first light. It is impressive how much more details and even prominences at the disk’s margin are almost readily visible. The B600 is very near to the limit of this setup, the vignetting is obvious when a bit misaligned. Next time one throws a big bag of money at my feet (don’t hit me with heavy bags, please), I’ll buy the B1200 or even the B1800. Even though the final image is, when viewed at a low resolution, looks similar to my previous ASI 178MM (cooled), Baader K-Line Filter 1.25″ (double stacked), TS-Optics 76/342 TS76EDPH, mountpusher, EQ3-mod images, the similarity arises without the post-processing, already in the live view. For the wider Baader filter, I apply an enhancement we might call „brighten is brighter than the context”, different from local contrast or global contrast application. Reflections and a bit of maybe astigmatism may be inherent to the system, but it’s something present in the Baader cell too.
I also modified the filterwheel controller to recognize the presence of the filterwheel, or external devices, by reading an analog pin, accounting for a low resolution given the relatively long network cable and the RJ45 connections. Thus, the counts resulting from a resistor pulling down the otherwise pulled up pin, identify this setup, and it automagically goes into the filename in sharpcap.
the raw output, stack of 300 best frames from the 5 minutes video, at 25 fps
a registax version
[ZWO ASI178MM] Pan=508 Tilt=0 Output Format=SER file (*.ser) Binning=1 Capture Area=2080x2080 Colour Space=MONO16 Temperature=28.3 Hardware Binning=On High Speed Mode=On Turbo USB=60(Auto) Flip=None Frame Rate Limit=Maximum Gain=0 Exposure=0.001097 Timestamp Frames=Off Brightness=0 Auto Exp Max Gain=255 Auto Exp Max Exp M S=30000 Auto Exp Target Brightness=100 Banding Threshold=35 Banding Suppression=0 Apply Flat=None Subtract Dark=None #Black Point Display Black Point=0 #MidTone Point Display MidTone Point=0.5 #White Point Display White Point=1 Notes= TimeStamp=2022-02-24T10:12:25.2432668Z SharpCapVersion=3.2.6421.0
