The late morning weather was just as forecasted, so I was able to get out and get some imaging done.

It was a bit chilly when I went out, about 53F for the entire 45 minute session. There was a slight surface breeze, and some scattered high, thin clouds. Observed sky conditions and the Firecapture display seemed consistent with Astrospheric’s forecast of Average transparency and Below Average seeing.

The NP101 was already on the G11. I added the ASI178MC for this session to take advantage of its frame rate (over the 60Da) and its sensor size (over the ASI290MM).

The solar disk diameter was just about the same length as the height of the sensor frame. To avoid missing some of the disk, I executed an upper and lower capture run that I would photomerge in processing.  The captures were full sensor frame (not an ROI) of 1000 frames. It took about 11s for each capture run. The exposure time was .8s, and the gain was 200.

The Good: Set up, start up and target acquisition went flawlessly. I hope in the near future to get to a point where I can do DSO this effortlessly.

The Bad: Nothing that I can think of.

The Ugly: Nothing more than just me.

I stacked the best 75% of 1000 frames in Autostakkert!, wavelet sharpened the stacked image in Registax, and finished in Photoshop, where I photomerged the two halves, extracted thumbnails four groups of sunspots, and pasted them into a reduced size solar disk image.