El Sol

08/30/25 - Clear skies... great views of the Sun.  Installed the Thousand Oaks solar film (aka Frisbee on the end of the OTA with a hole cut out for the film) and the solar film for the guide camera and captured several sets of SER video frames and FITS stills through the 0.63x Starizona flattener / reducer and the dual narrow band filter around 13:00.  Left the CCD cooler off...reset gain to 50, offset 24.

Tweaked polar alignment a bit adjusting azimuth to try and get the OTA pointed to the sun...then switched to mount controls for final centering using the Svbony 405cc.  Worked with focus to get the sharpest views of the wide range of visible sun spots with adjustments as the OTA heated up. 

Tried creating a stack using Siril from the SER file (following a brier tutorial). Did not use normalization in the stacking tab (no normalization).  Set levels in the GIMP, including desaturation to remove the Thousand Oaks solar film red / orange tint from the image.

The Sun captured with Meade LX10 EMC with Starizona SCT Corrector III (0.63 focal reducer) (1250mm @ F6.3) using Thousand Oaks solar film on a Celestron CGM DX out on the back porch on 08/30/2025 at ~1:35pm Eastern time. 50x1.05s on Svbony 405cc at gain 50, offset 24 with a generic dual narrow band filter. Unguided. Siril used to register and stack the top 25 frames based on quality The GIMP used to desaturate the image (to remove Thousand Oaks solar film red tinge). Image scale approximately 1 degree with ~0.63"/pixel. Captured using Kstars/Ekos/Indi as a single SER file4144x2822x50 pixels at 16 bits per pixel.


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