Waiting on the Sun

I am all set up to do some solar imaging but I am now waiting for the sun to clear the trees.  This time of year, the sun travels very low across the sky so I only have a relatively short window of opportunity to observe or view the sun.  

I plan to start with some white light observing and imaging of the sun's photosphere.  My solar wedge solar filter includes a Continuum filter as well as the usual IR/UV Cut, Neutral Density and Polarizing filters which has always worked fairly well for me.  I've observed and imaged this way before so there is nothing new with this configuration.  I plan to do something new today too though.  I now have a narrowband 3nm Calcium K filter inside a different solar wedge filter that I have yet to try so that will be part of today's plan.  This should produce nicer results.  

The one "different" thing about this filter is that this Calcium K filter is not an observing filter.  Actually, my eyes should see nothing through this filter.  My camera, however, should be able to pick up the sun filtered through this filter.  As I said, this configuration is new to me so we'll see how it goes.

I plan to start with my smallest telescope which provides the widest views.  I hope to get the whole solar disk in the frame with this smaller telescope which is why I am starting with this small, widefield telescope.  I have a larger telescope ready to go for some closeups of the surface of the sun.  

Quite often, I just observe the sun with a telescope mounted on a manual mount.  This time, I have one of my tracking mounts all set up on my pier so that the mount and telescope will track the sun as the Earth rotates.  This should keep the sun in my field of view which means I can take my time and be deliberate with each step of this imaging and observing session which will be a nice change.

Now, I just need to wait for the sun to clear the trees...

UPDATE - 1400 hours:  Well, as usual, my luck brought a sky full of high, thin cloud cover before the sun cleared the trees!  

While the sun was behind the trees and before the cloud cover rolled in, I was observing the sun through my telescope and it was looking nice.  I was getting excited.  By the time the sun was just clearing the trees, the sky was mostly white with just a hint of the palest of blue through the white clouds.  

I briefly thought about just packing everything up and bringing it back inside but I decided to do some observing and imaging anyway.  I figured that, even if I couldn't get any decent images out of it, it was worth running through the whole procedure for practice.  I did find that one piece of software either wasn't working or I have forgotten how to use it.  I'll need to look into that.  Fortunately, I had another software program to use instead.

I have to say that the new Calcium K solar filter was stunning!  At first, when the sun appeared on the screen, it was terribly overexposed with no detail visible whatsoever.  As I slowly turned the aperture ring on the Calcium K filter to cut down on enough sunlight to allow me to see detail on the surface of the sun on my computer screen, I actually said, "Oh WOW!" out loud even though nobody was within earshot.  The amount of detail visible was truly stunning.  

Sheila is home from work today since it is Veteran's Day so she checked out the sun in both white light and Calcium K.  It was nice to be able to show her sunspots as well as bubbling granulation, faculae and plages.  I think she's seen an occasional sunspot in the past but today was a first for her to clearly see faculae, plages and granulation as it slowly bubbles in the sun's photosphere.  

I'll have to upload the imaging data to my desktop before I can see how the imaging turned out through the thin clouds.  Hopefully there will be something salvageable in the data to provide a couple of good images.