152mm Lunt solar scope
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Astrolearning
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152mm Lunt solar scope
Hi guys, first time posting in this forum I do try to use Sharpcap when I am trying to do solar. I purchased my scope about a year and a half ago I live in Massachusetts never ever should’ve purchased 152 mm scope, especially solar in this neighborhood. Just not enough days in the air to accomplish anything much. So three weeks ago I had called.Peter at Lunt to ask him a question about my EM 200 mount and using the 152 on it. About seven or eight months ago Peter and I had some conversations also. My focus are cone was loose. He asked me on the phone to screw it off and look inside I did and he asked if I had the straight through 3500 filter I said yes however it is wicked foggy. Peter said you need to send that to me immediately to which I did and they had polished the original glass and installed a new glass in the focus I had sent. I received it yesterday no matter how many times I tried maybe 40 times in the last year and a half to image our great star I could never get my ASI 174MM to see the sun. I thought it was something I was doing being a newbie. Hopefully it was just the wicked foggy glass on my straight through 3500 filter that was causing this problem. It looks like Monday coming in. I will have a shot at finding out. Just wanted to vent a little however any helper ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
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Re: 152mm Lunt solar scope
Hi,
sorry to hear that you had hardware issues with the scope - hopefully resolved now.
One of the big challenges of solar can be finding the sun - no chanced of using plate solving to help you in daylight! I have a small visual solar finder (SVBony) for rough alignment. From there, turn the camera gain and exposure up (and use SharpCap's display stretch function) until you see some sort of grey image rather than the usual black seen through an H-alpha filter that's not pointing in the right place. Once you have that grey showing and are moderately close to the sun, just start moving the mount one way then another - keep going in the directions that make the grey get brighter (turn down the exposure/gain/stretch as needed). What you are doing is navigating the glow around the solar disc - moving towards the brighter regions nearer the sun and eventually you will get the disc in view (even if badly out of focus). From there it's just a matter of focusing and getting the camera settings right
cheers,
Robin
sorry to hear that you had hardware issues with the scope - hopefully resolved now.
One of the big challenges of solar can be finding the sun - no chanced of using plate solving to help you in daylight! I have a small visual solar finder (SVBony) for rough alignment. From there, turn the camera gain and exposure up (and use SharpCap's display stretch function) until you see some sort of grey image rather than the usual black seen through an H-alpha filter that's not pointing in the right place. Once you have that grey showing and are moderately close to the sun, just start moving the mount one way then another - keep going in the directions that make the grey get brighter (turn down the exposure/gain/stretch as needed). What you are doing is navigating the glow around the solar disc - moving towards the brighter regions nearer the sun and eventually you will get the disc in view (even if badly out of focus). From there it's just a matter of focusing and getting the camera settings right
cheers,
Robin