Having patiently waited 14 weeks since placing my order (I blame the eclipse ) my new toys arrived last week, a Lunt 50mm dedicated H-alpha scope and a Neptune-M camera from Player One.  

Being a total beginner in the world of solar imaging I had spent a good few months trawling through forums and YouTube for help and advice. 

After tinkering as much as I could indoors, yesterday I had my first opportunity to put the scope out in the sun where it belongs. A whole new challenge for me with heaps to learn, definitely a different ball game to my usual deep sky imaging. 

So how did it go?

Finding the sun wasn't too difficult, I roughly pointed my mount to polaris and used the AM5 app to slew to the sun, not quite landing the sun in the field of view but close enough to find and centre it. 

I did my best to focus and learn the effects of the pressure tuner, my first attempts at tuning in the morning ended in failure. I thought I had it but not really knowing what I was looking for I pushed ahead, the resulting videos didn't really show any detail at all, they looked more like white light images than H-alpha to me. I tried again in the afternoon and with a bit more time to play realised I needed to rack the tuner much further in. In the morning I had it all the way out to the point that the handle was almost coming off, it wasn't until I screwed the tuner about 75% in towards the scope that details suddenly emerged. I hear tuning is a bit of a black art but hopefully I'm there or thereabouts. 

Captured using SharpCap Pro, processing was a combo of AutoStakkert, Imppg and Photoshop leaning on a couple of great video tutorials online, I danced between a few but I'm sure I will settle on a workflow in time. 

I didn't take or apply a flat here, so there are some areas of uneven illumination, something to improve upon for future images. Quite happy with my first bash at it and really excited to delve deeper, at some point I may even buy an eye piece and do some observing (a dirty word around here )

Clear skies all and thanks for looking
Danny