Koehler Urban Astrophotography

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 th...

04/01/2025 - Configured a new (to me) 8-position 1.25" Xagyl filter wheel successfully on the venerable LX10.  The Starizona SCT Corrector III is inserted into the Meade zero-shift micro focuser and then there's spacing for proper back focus to the Svbony 405cc (including the 17mm width of the new filter wheel).  Due to the moon, set up the scheduler to capture a set of light frames of M106 using the dual narrow band (Ha/OIII) filter first followed by a set of light frames using the UV/IR filter.   The key configuration test was setting up the plate solver and auto focus module to utilize the UV/IR filter during those stages...for collection of light frames with the dual narrow band filter (where these steps are extremely hard through the filter itself. Conditions started reasonable with no clouds but the moon at 23% and setting at midnight...but clouds expected near 03:00.  Set up the dual narrow band (mislabeled H_Alpha) first with 120s exposures  Seeing ...