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Damon Scotting · The Telescope Man The Sun: What Your Budget Sees

The Sun: What Your Budget Sees

From smart scopes in solar mode to hydrogen-alpha, raw and final

    Sun Index Tick what you can see.

    The captures

    What each rung is, and what it is not

    1. R6 · Sky-Watcher Heliostar 76HaFinal: my stack of this capture (best 25% per alignment point, mild sharpening), shown in the Quark rung's gold H-alpha palette (one fixed palette).Capture: the full-length camera-view MP4 of the same capture, exported from the SER (8-bit, not the raw file); mono, shown in the same gold palette.
    2. R5 · Hope D60 + Quark ChromosphereFinal: my live stack from early in the partial eclipse, with only a small bite. The score is the Hope D60's.Raw: the session's only SER, about 24 minutes later, so the bite is bigger; mono, shown in the final's warm palette (one fixed palette).
    3. R4 · Seestar S50 ProFinal: the stack the S50 Pro made from its own solar video.Raw: the original RAW AVI of a clip from the same session (its steadiest 10 s for brightness, later in the clip), scaled once to the stack's disc.
    4. R3 · Seestar S30 ProFinal: the S30 Pro's own Solar photo (all metadata removed).Raw: the original RAW AVI of a zoomed clip from the same session, scaled once to the photo's disc.
    5. R2 · DWARF 3Final: the sharpest single frame of the scope's own solar video, given the smart scopes' white-light orange for display (one fixed palette).App video: the DWARF 3's own MP4, not a raw capture; the steadiest 10 s of the clip, held still on the disc (sub-pixel centring, a median of several frames' centres) and given the same fixed palette.
    6. R1 · DWARF miniFinal: the sharpest single frame of the scope's own solar video (no stack or raw file was saved).App video: the DWARF mini's own MP4, not a raw capture.

    Every rung is a real capture by Damon, made with proper solar filtering. Raw loops: demosaic (colour sensors), one sky pedestal, one fixed gain, one fixed scale where the final came from another clip of the same rig, and a translation to hold the disc on the final's grid; nothing sharpened, stacked or blended, in real time. App videos are the scope's own recordings, not raw files, and say so. Prices are US list prices, approximate; a + means part of the rig has no price there. No capture dates or places are shown.