My first Solar observation session - wow!

[Adam Y]

I received my Celestron solar filter cap in the post yesterday and finally had time to set things up this afternoon.  Of course it isn't as spectacular as some of the amazing images I've seen on this and other forums but still - wow!  There is something special about seeing these things in real time with your own eyes.  I was able to focus pretty well considering a few thin clouds moving in and out, and the sunspots are easily visible!  

 

I found the best compromise with eyepieces to be the 17mm with orange filter.  That gives me 120x with this scope, still more than enough - too large to see the entire disc, but still small enough to find some features to focus on.

 

The tracking is "OK" but over time things tend to drift more than I thought would be the case - is there any way to fine tune this through the menu? In this case I used Solar System Align right on the Sun centred in the 25mm eyepiece, then chose tracking rate of "Solar" since it was the Sun.  The result is pretty much the same at night whether i use skyalign or auto 2 star or solar align on Jupiter... Any thoughts?  I use "sidereal" on other objects such as Jupiter.  I am testing now to see how long it takes to drift completely out of view of the 25mm.  Obviously will be correspondingly quicker in the higher power eyepieces (probably a formula somewhere for that).

 

This is the Nexstar 8SE with the latest firmware.

 

Edited November 1, 2022 by Adam Y