Align sun eclipse's photos

[duyduy.tran]

Hi guy, I took around 1000 photos of the solar eclipse on last 10 May. However, I only use my DSLR to take photo without any tracker or guiding so the sun appear in different areas in my photos.
Could anyone help me how to align all of these photos so then I'll be able to combine them and make a time-lapse movie?
Oh, and there're around 10-20 photos which were covered by thick clouds so I think I have to align them manually.
Thanks

[OzEclipse]

You didn't give us much info to go on. Reading between the lines, it sounds like you didn't use a long telephoto. If you used a filter you'll have lots of little white disks on I think you'll have to align them all manually. If you took images with a filter so that you have lots of little white disks on a black background. This isn't enough for a stacking program to lock onto and there is no angular reference for the de-rotation.

So you'll probably have to stack them manually.

Joe

[sil]

You may be able to run them through PIPP (might have to compile into an uncompressed AVI first). PIPP can look for a solar disc and center it then output to images or a video.

I use PIPP a lot for solar/lunar discs in my DSLR images to center ("register") them for easier stacking in PI or Registax (which may have difficulties aligning properly).

[OzEclipse]

Sil,

That's very interesting. I'll have to have a look at it. What does it use as a reference to de-rotate the images?

Joe

[sil]

Sorry, wasn't clear on what you wanted. PIPP won't de-rotate, but will give you a better registered set to work off.

When processing the venus transit I ended up having to do lots of batches (for solar I'm using a white light filter on a 500mm lens so I hand hold and burst the shots). So I had lots of shots taken within a second or two I could align/stack/process to bring out detail...rinse and repeat at intervals for the event to end up with a reduced set (but higher quality) and then would measure the angle between two sunspots in each to derotate.

It's a shame the sun doesnt come with a nice lat/long grid and axis pole sticking out of it to help alignment. You could also use the timestamps of your shots and something like stellarium to tell you the tilt of the sun at the time of shot. The EXIF data should record to the second (maybe less) but you may need a, EXIF reader tool to see it....take a reference photo now and compare the clock time of the camera to real time and see how far its out. So time plus and astronomy app should give you position/rotation info for the sun.