Sunflower from Palm Cove beach

[MarkJ]

Hi All,

I was at Palm Cove for the eclipse with my wife and two sons and we were incredibly luck that the clouds cleared just before totality. It was an incredibly moving event particularly with the clouds "just" clearing, I was still shaking for some time after totality.

My camera was busy collecting a series of exposure with the intent to stack then to reveal the extent of the corona. See attached image. This image is a stack of ten images each varying in exposure by one stop.

Software used was Fitswork as suggest by Phil from a suggestion by Geoff Sims. And of course, Photoshop.

Best regards,

Mark Justice.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/89672172/SunflowerFromThePalmCoveBeach_s.jpg

[Larryp]

That's a superb image, Mark!

[RickS]

Very nice, Mark!

[DavidTrap]

That's impressive.

Have been planning to try that software on my data!

DT

[Paul Haese]

Very nice image. Certainly what I will be looking for when reprocessing my image.

[iceman]

Stunning image, Mark!

[geoffsims]

Hi Mark,

WOW - you've nailed it! I'm glad that technique worked for you, this is an outstanding image.

I am wondering what happened to the Earthshine portion of it though? There is obvious structure visible, but the details are not there. I wonder if that could have been because of all the processing steps. Is it possible to use one of your longer exposures, stretch the hell out of it to see Earthshine, and stack it on top?

Geoff

Edit: I actually cannot stop staring at this image. It is probably the best representation (of what I remember seeing with the naked eye) that I have come across so far.

[StephenM]

Outstanding image indeed! Great stuff Mark!

Cheers,
Stephen

[MarkJ]

Thanks Laurie, Rick, David, Paul, Mike, Geoff and Stephen for your kind words and glad you liked the image.

Geoff,

My plan was to capture earthshine and I practiced just after the last new moon on the earthshine beside the thin crescent moon sorting out what exposure was needed and applied this to the eclipse but for some reason I did not capture it. I took some of my longer exposures and stretch the hell out of them and all I got was something like what is in my image :-( In the end I just took the moon part of my image stack and stretched the hell out of it and then blended it on top of the corona to generate what you see in my image. Where I was at Palm Cove there was quite a lot of thin wispy cloud that may have hidden the earthshine from me, I still don't really understand why I cannot see it in my images.

Using the suggested Larsen-Sekanina filter, Fitsworks seems to do a great job selecting the radial nature of the corona and in some ways filters out the cloud. When you apply the Larsen-Sekanina filter you specify the centre of the sun so it knows the orientation of the radial features.

I see David (h0ughy) has captured the earthshine very well, I'll have to ask him what he did. He seems to have a *lot* of data in his image

Note that I followed the tutorial at your link using the "combine images with manual offset" option to stack my images. In addition I applied some wavelet filtering/sharpening to the mask before multiplying with the image stack.

BTW Nice time lapse Geoff, it is great to see the shadow and you can see the camera working away!

Mark

[Matt Wastell]

Super image - congrats!

[ChrisM]

Mark - I can see why you called it the sunflower, and it's the best corona I've seen from this event. I'm going to check out that software too.

Chris

[ourkind]

Absolutely stunning, so glad you were able to capture it so clearly!! Well done :thumbsup:

[Forgey]

Beautiful image Mark.

[SkyViking]

Wow that looks absolutely stunning, breathtaking corona details there! I can only imagine the quality of images that'll come out once all you guys finish processing your data.

[Deeno]

Very impressive!

[Adelastro1]

Very nice indeed. Well done. I need to try this software on mine when I get a chance too.

[iceman]

This amazing image is now IOTW (http://www.iceinspace.com.au).

[jjjnettie]

:) And a very well deserve IOTW it is too. It's a stunner. :)

[californiastars]

Excellent job, Mark! My wife and I made it down to Cairns from the US specifically for the eclipse (under the guise of a vacation). We were positioned along the highway just south of Rex Lookout. We saw totality for literally 3-5 seconds between the clouds. Unfortunately, I was still focused for the solar filter, so it was out of focus when the clouds broke and I removed the filter now that it was in totality. Ugh. But witnessing it was absolutely amazing.

Attached is the best I was able to get...

Now to prepare for August 21, 2017!!! :-)

[refractorman]

Truly outstanding Mark!! :2thumbs:

Not sure how you'd feel about this, but I run a free-to-schools science magazine that generally includes a classroom wall poster. This image would be perfect for one of our posters if you'd be OK with us using it? No problem if not, just thought I'd ask :)

I'm not on ice in space as often as I'd like, but can be contacted at timwetherell@gmail.com if you're interested

all the best

Tim

[Quark]

What a stunning result, exceptional really. Top Stuff Mark.

Regards
Trevor

[gregbradley]

Super image Mark, well done.

Greg.

[ourkind]

:thumbsup: IOTW :thumbsup:

Couldn't agree more! :)

[David Fitz-Henr]

A stunning image Mark - you've certainly made the most of the brief period of totality! Well done on the IOTW as well!!

[Inmykombi]

Very nice image indeed Mark.
So much detail it is incredible...:eyepop:


Congrats with Image of the week too.

[h0ughy]

nice work and well done. I think that you could redo it again using the camera debayer setting ticked so that you have some colour - just a thought, after all you have some great data to work with

[multiweb]

Great corona. Congrats on IOTW. :thumbsup:

[MarkJ]

Thank you everyone for your generous compliments and glad you enjoyed the image. Thank you Mike for the IOTW, very chuffed.

I must give credit for the "Sunflower" name to Bratislav who named the image "Sunflower from the Palm Cove beach" soon after I showed it to him. I remember some impressive sun flowers in his back yard :-)

Daniel, you did very well to get the image you did though only a few seconds hole in clouds!

Houghy, thanks for the debayering suggestion, I'll do some homework and see what I can do.

Mark

[Phil Hart]

Love it Mark. Great detail. :thumbsup:

I just want the world to stop turning so I can get off and try the same techniques on my images!

Phil

[MarkJ]

Thanks Phil,

Hope you get some time to apply the techniques to your images soon. Let me know if you get stuck with Fitswork as I might be able to help but really I just followed the tutorial at the link and manually aligned and stacked my images.

Here's the Fitswork link again for others that might have missed it.

http://www.gva-hamburg.de/sofi2006/fitswork/sofi_fitswork_uk.htm

Mark

[Phil Hart]

I've only had time for a quick play and a half with FitsWork. I am getting similar detail to your image, but the outer areas have a lot of noise.. the cumulative effect of adding all the individual images together and summing the noise.

Did you do anything to reduce noise in your stack.. subtracting bias/dark frames or something in Fitswork itself?

My appreciation of the result you got is even higher now!

Phil

[naskies]

Very nice!

[MarkJ]

Glad you liked it Dave.

Phil,

The cumulative effect of adding all the individual images together should *reduce* the noise so the more images you can add the better off you are. I added 9 (maybe 10) images together (in Fitswork!) each of these varying in exposure by one stop. These were all raw images converted to 16bit tiff in Canon DPP software before processing with Fitswork. Shots were taken on a Canon 7D at ISO settings from 100 to 400 ASA so my original images are reasonable noise free.

I did not do any dark or bias subtraction to my original images although I I did consider bias subtraction as I could see some vertical banding in my original raw images although this was only when I pushed the background contrast aggressively, which I suppose is really what we are doing. Because I was shooting on an undriven tripod all my images were slightly differently framed so after alignment/stacking the banding averages out and "disappears". However, I'm still interested in going back to my images and subtracting bias.

When I look at my unprocessed image stack it looks quite noise free.

I generated a mask by applying the Larson-Sekanina filter to the image stack. I used 5.0/1.13 but played with reducing the 1.13 but image started to look noisy and over processed even though the detail was a little more contrasty. I wanted my image to look "smooth". The mask was quite noisy so I applied some wavelet filtering and then a slight median filter to it before multiplying it with the image stack.

After that it was mainly histogram adjustment and pasting the separately processed Moon which was also taken from the same image stack. My aim was to capture earthshine but I failed, perhaps there is a little there but I think it is really that thin wispy cloud that remained after that horrible dark stuff amazingly move aside :-)

I hope some of this helps.

Best regards,

Mark

ps I used the Eclipsedroid ap on my android phone to run a script and control my 7D via a USB cable. I worked really well and my phone was also capturing images controlled by the same script but I forgot to remove the cover I had over its lens at the start of totality :-( Anyway, 7D images were good.

[Retrograde]

Wow - simply superb!

[Jen]

:eyepop: wow mark gorgeous pic well done :thumbsup:

[Dujon]

I'm a bit late coming in. Sorry. Mark, I was 'gobsmacked' when I first saw your image. Whilst I haven't as yet looked at any other images of the eclipse on this site, that is the most beautiful depiction of the corona that I've yet seen. Certainly the earth-shine would have been a nice, but relatively unimportant, touch but, to me, the corona, prominences and loops are the prime reasons for viewing images such as yours. In the vernacular, Mark, you 'nailed it'. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the result with those of us who couldn't be there.