Rare Sunspot

Camera Struggles Continue

After many months with no significant sunspots a good sized spot finally appeared on April 10th. Two large prominences were also visible through an eyepiece. A four-hour window of clear skies along with comfortable temperatures in the mid 60's to low 70's made this a good day continue working with my ZWO ASI 1600 camera.

The first picture below, made with a 3X Barlow, shows solitary sunspot 2738, on an otherwise featureless disc. Only one prominence is dimly seen along the limb because exposure time and camera gain were not sufficient to properly capture dim prominences.

The camera malfunctioned from the very beginning of this observing session. Intermittent, thin, bright and dark horizontal lines appeared throughout the laptop preview screen. (A few of these defects show up along the limb at the very top of the previous image, but only if it is increased to full size.) It seemed like the camera couldn't download the chip contents completely without gaps in random locations. I tried pushing the USB plug in more firmly as well as using a different USB wire. I tried adjusting the USB traffic setting. Nothing eliminated the horizontal lines. Merely moving the Sun within the field of view caused horizontal lines to temporarily increase before settling into a less pervasive, but still existing effect. This problem did not happen during the previous three times I'd used the camera. Next time I'll try using a powered USB hub to see if it will eliminate the problem, but I'm beginning to think the camera has a hardware defect.

The sunspot itself had a bisected umbra more clearly visible in the next somewhat fuzzy cropped image.

A dramatic array of prominences were present around the limb as you can see in the next flawed image. Once again, I failed to capture prominences without also capturing unwanted, uneven background light. In this 2-panel mosaic the disc is overexposed. Horizontal streaks were also visible before I tediously removed some of them manually with Photoshop. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Notice the imperfect blending of constituent panels at the bottom of the image.

After working with the 3X Barlow I switched to a 5X Barlow and successfully removed circular interference fringes by slightly loosening one screw on the tilt adjuster. This was one success in an otherwise disappointing session. Unfortunately, I couldn't continue working with the 5X Barlow because clouds moved in.

At this point I'm losing patience with this balky camera. If I can't find solutions to problems soon, I may try to return it and hope for a refund.