Herstmonceux Astronomy Festival

Off to the Herstmonceux Astronomy Festival today. Hope to see a few Flamsteed members there… I’ll report back later!

Have fun!

A fun event... shame that the high cloud for most of the day put paid to many observing activities. Thanks to Nick for driving down to Herstmonceux... we were there for most of the day, but decided not to stay for the evening session, as it didn't look like the skies would clear.

Good to see Rupert and Malcolm on site. Best of luck to Rupert today in the world record attempt to image the Sun (largest mosaic image). I hope the skies clear for you.

It's always a treat to head down to Herstmonceux, and I'd highly recommend it for a day out.

Good luck Rupert! Look forward to hearing about it / seeing the end result!

Hi Folks

So the record attempt at Hersty went quite smoothly really. I was in a bit of a panic about two days before because we needed two imaging rigs that were as closely matched as possible. The intention being we would image the whole disc with two scopes, one starting at the top, the other the bottom so that we would have redundancy and be able to fill any holes. The plan was then to image a prominence ring at different exposure settings to make them stand out more.

Mike had kindly lent me his APM 100/800, which together with mine meant we had two scopes within .3 strehl of each other. The Point Grey cameras were consistent but what was needed were two H-Alpha filters that were the same. We had planned to use Daystar Quarks, but being a 'budget' H-Alpha filter, they are not guaranteed to be identical. Daystar did an excellent job of matching up two Quarks for us but then kept me on tenter hooks with shipping. It got so close we almost cancelled. In the end they sent the filters overnight from the US. Well done Daystar but next time don't leave it so late!

We finally got a break in the cloud on Sunday morning and decided to go for it as soon as the Sun was up. Well known solar imagers Gary Palmer and Pete Lawrence took the controls while I fended off the those that just could not resist ignoring the barriers around the scopes to get that bit closer.

In the end we managed to get two full discs of just over 130 panels. The prominence ring was abandoned after about 15 minutes due to thick cloud which was a shame. Fortunately we think we can extract a ring from one of the surface passes and stretch it to give us some good proms. It won't be as good as the dedicated ring but should be OK.

So now its weeks of processing ahead. See below for some pictures from the event

This was a test shot taken the day before the attempt which was imaged through cloud. It gave us enough confidence to go for it.

This was the technical bit.....

.....and our little dome

Many congratulations... look forward to seeing the result.

Most amusing to see Pete Lawrence under that blanket... are you sure he was imaging? Looks like he had a bad cold and was inhaling some Vicks!!

Congratulations Rupert, great mission, look forward to seeing the final result in a few weeks!