Hello,
I have been a casual viewer for years but I have just started to actual count and sketch spots. I have reviewed alot of documentation but somehow I am confused about the orientation of the drawing.
I used an Orion Mak 102 mm and I know the view is flipped left-to-right. So how does everybody handle that when sketching your view?
Also, I am curious how I orient my sketch to match the view I get from the Tilting Sun app. I tried to attach my sketch and the Tilting Sun screen but apparently this is not possible in this forum?? So not sure this makes sense without the images.
The answers are all in your tilting Sun app. The blue labels show the Earth axis orientations and the red are the Solar latitude, longitude, position of pole and axis tilt. When you draw your sketches note the E-W-N-S coordinates on your drawing. You may need to check the box to flip image horizontally. You may need to rotate your diagonal as well as needed.
If you can print the screen from the app draw directly on that.
Hi,
You may look into the images in the Solarchatforum.com and look art my images under my name rsfoto. Thise are correctly oriented and you can take this as a guide of the placement of the Sunspots. Keep in mind that in these days the Sun is rotated towards the west (CW) with an angle of about 26°
Rainer
Thanks for the reply. For a Mak with a diagonal, I should have to flip horizonally, I believe. But what do you mean by “rotate your diagonal”? Not sure I understand what that would do??
Something is not making sense. The direction of drift was clearly to the upper left in my eyepiece as is shown by TiltedSun. But my longitude is incorrectly entered as 80. It should be -80. If I enter -80, the the direction of drift, according to Tilted Sun is in the direction straight down.
Hmmm. It is still not letting me upload a jpg or png file. It says “You can’t embed media items in your post”. Any idea why that might be??
Hi,
Thanks for drawing my attention to that horrible error. I am at -101 and UTC -6. Central Mexico
It has really no influence so far and the error is mintor as the sun in 24 hours changes not so much independent where you are in the world.
What type of mount do you have, equatorial or Alt-Azi? That makes a big difference in order to explain you how to place the diagonal.
In order to upload images click on the PC with the arrow pointing upwards or if you hace a screenshot in your clipboard just paste it into the message.
if I enter -80 for longitude, I havee to UNcheck “flip horizontal” and CHECK “invert” to get the direction of drift to match what I was seeing thru the eyepiece. The sun would drift to the upper left. That is probably similar to what you should see since are lat/longs are somewhat similar.
For the images, that is what I am doing. I can upload it into the reply but when I save it, there is the error. I wonder if my login doesn’t have the proper privileges or something. I will contact the admin. But thanks for your help on that anyway.
I have an equatorial mount and so no field rotation and the Sun in my camera has always the same rotation.
Check thoroughly all the setup points you have in TitltingSun software.
I think I am getting there. Here is a screenshot of my sketch and Tilting Sun and an image of the spots. If I use +80 for longitude it looks more correct. If I put in -80, it does not and is rotated 90 degrees CCW.
I guess I don’t quite understand what the display is trying to show. Is it trying to show the correct cardinal points and rotation as I see it through my eyepiece with the chosen settings?
But then since my view is flipped left/right from the diagonal, I actually have to turn my sketch over to match and then I don’t think things match Tilting Sun anymore. Definitely a little confused but I am getting pretty good an counting the spots already.
Good. You told me taht I had the wrong longitude beacuse it shoudl be -101 but now you being at -80 use 80
Remember the sun rotates from east to west and so the arrows are wrong in tilting sun.
Yes, those are the mind bending exercises you have to do when you use a diagonal and an Alt-Azi mount.
Uncheck Flip image horizontally and you need then to flip also your brain when you sketch Everyhting is easier when using an equatorial mount as you have NO field rotation as with an Alt-Azi mount the field rotates by the minute and even worse by the hour.
So you need a lot of thinking while drawing or draw really fast.
A correct drawing needs North on the top and East on the left.
Look here but without the P-Value taken into account as this is a Synotpic map from NOAA which is drawn daily
You can look at SDO images (sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov) to give you orientation. I also look at images from kanzelhohe observatory (cesar.kso.ac.at). These will show you spot orientation on the solar disk and north and south orientation.
@descott12 I just discovered I have an erect-image prism diagonal. An old cheapo one in my junk box but that should make things alot easier.
Years ago I tried a correct image prism diagonal for lunar observing. I found a slight degrading in the quality of the image (visual). It would be interesting to compare what you see of the smallest sunspots with an ordinary star diagonal.
Good point. My seeing doesn’t ever appear to be very good. The a normal dielectric diagonal, I can only get 100X max on a typical day. We’ll see…
