Coronado PST

After buying a PST off the lads in Andromeda Optics yesterday (thanks Wally & Jimmy), the gods decided to part the clouds and grant me a full day's observing. Remarkable, I know!

Well, to put it simply, I'm very pleased with the performance of this little scope. It may only be 40mm aperture and less than 1A bandpass, but it works much better than I had anticipated. I had looked through a couple of h-alpha scopes before but nothing beats being able to sit down, tweak everything to your preference and gulp in long periods of observing. I tried a wide range of eyepieces and they all came into focus with room to spare.

What surprised me the most was the level of detail visible on the solar disc. Alot has been said about the use of this scope for prominances, and yes, I did see a few. However, it does alot more than that by showing filaments, spots, plage etc. A surprising level of detail actually.

I tried to capture an image in the afternoon. However, processing h-alpha images requires very different processing techniques to what I have used before, so I haven't done the image any justice to be honest. Hopefully my processing skills will improve with time.



This image was taken by simply holding a basic digital camera up to the eyepiece and taking a snapshot. I then split the image into Red, Green and Blue. The majority of the detail on the solar disc lies on the green and blue layers. I averaged these two layers, adjusted the levels and curves to enhance the contrast and then applied a yellow filter across it. I pushed the levels on the red image to enhance the prominances and then merged the two resulting images together.

In reality through, more detail is visible than this image shows. Several other smaller fainter prominances could be seen and more subtle detail was visible on the solar disc. In the scope the image is much more red, but for imaging purposes, everyone taking h-alpha images seems to either use monochrome or yellow so I followed suit.

A cool feature is the adjustment of the bandpass. You can tune it to see features on the surface or to see material that has blown off the surface land which is heading our direction!

Overall, I'm quite pleased with it.

Nice detail there Mike. It has a 3D effect, in that it looks like a spotty globe in a dark box!

welcome to the "red side" Micheal,
the PST is my most used scope. I leave it
mounted on an eq3,use it a couple of times a week
if it is sunny! The more you use it, the more detail
you will see. enjoy!
Pat

Hi Pat,

Good to here you enjoy your PST also!
By any chance have you tried any imaging with it yet?

Clear & sunny skies,

I was wondering hw long this would take :lol: :lol:
Nice detail, I also found it difficult to process these images when I minded the WSP h-alpha scopes before the raffle. :lol:
One trick I found was to capture the image in black and white and convert it to the h-alpha red afterwards, or whatever colour. If you think about it, the h-alpha sun is all one colour of differing intensities.
I like the 5 and 11 oclock images of the flares.

What surprised me Dave was how the detail was captured. It's on a very narrow wavelength of light that appears red. However, the puzzle is that all the detail on the solar disc was recorded on the green and blue layers. Bit of a strange one to me. The details of the flares were on the red layer, which had zero detail of the disc.
Can anyone explain that to me :