M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy (aka Galaxy 9), has been giving me grief this year. I’ve tried to image it a few times but something happened each time. Finally, Thursday night I was able to get a decent image. This is made from 44 two minute images with my C11 at f/6.3 with an Antlia Quadband light pollution filter and my ZWO ASI294MC Pro. I started with 51 images but seven of them had satellite trails in them.
I went to the River Ridge Observatory Saturday morning to image the Sun. The seeing was supposed to be very good and I’ve learned to shoot the Sun early, not just for the seeing but because it gets hot. It was already 86F when I left just after 9AM and 90F in town when I got there. These are sunspot groups 3712 (upper left) and 3713 (lower right) and they are quite large though there’s nothing to show scale here. This is the best 500 of 1000 one millisecond images stacked and processed. For once, I was able to bring out some of the granularity of the chromosphere.
I woke up early and decided I might as well make the most of it. I headed to Petit Jean Mountain to shoot the sunrise, an hour’s drive. Once that was done, I went to the River Ridge Observatory to shoot the Sun through a white light filter. This time, I used a 3x magnifier to increase the focal length to 4500mm and f/ratio to f/36. A new sunspot cluster has come around from the other side.
