Good evening HAL,
I today I got to play with the Coronado PST for the first time alongside my Player One Apollo M mini camera. I have never had or used a solar scope so I spent the entire morning and part of the afternoon toasting myself. Thankfully my Latino genetics kicked in and gave me a beautiful cinnamon roll tan.
Anyway, I came to a few realizations after hours of doing this.
1. I really enjoyed this!
2. I still have a lot to learn
3. I am going to invest a lot of time learning this new part of the hobby.
4. Here I go again… I already set my mind to save to get a more “photography “ based solar scope as this one is not really made for it.
I got this solar scope as a gift/donation last month, and even though it is a gateway into solar, and Coronado is sadly no longer in business, it is a very nice way to get started in this hobby.
I spent several hours figuring out the etalon calibration, which is far more sensitive than I thought for imaging.
This also made me learn daylight polar alignment. It was not as difficult as I thought it would be, and thankfully my AM5 mount was able to track the sun properly once I polar aligned it.
The biggest challenge was figuring out the gain and exposure settings to get the sun nicely in focus and not over expose it (which I did in the end).
After that, I spent a couple of hours in the post processing, to the point that I forgot today was the member’s star party and missed it (I was very excited learning how to do this properly).
My image is far from perfect. I can tell I over exposed based on the overly bright spots, I also need to work on the etalon adjustments better as I believe that is the reason the upper right and lower left corners are darker and have no much detail but I could be wrong, but overall I am really happy and really proud of this image, so no more yapping, here is my first image of the sun attached to the email.
I know some members of this group are really active in solar, so please let me know if you have any recommendations for adjusting the etalon, the gain and the exposure, and also if there is a solar scope you would recommend me to aim for (of course I would love to get the sky-watcher helio star but I don’t want to have to save for 3 years for it).
