Hi Karen
Whilst I am quite experienced in Solar imaging, animations are not strength and there are others on this forum who are better placed to comment. Here are my observations and thoughts.
You want to capture visible change, so the best way to do this is to lengthen the time between exposures, not lessen them to 15 seconds. If you make more frames, then yes it is smoother, but it will be like watching grass grow. You will have doubled the number of frames and to better see change you may have to speed it to 60 fps instead of 30fps.
So I suggest 2-3 minutes between images. Let's say 2 mins that gives 90 frames over 3 hours. You then run that at about 10 fps. Yes it will be a 9 second slower motion clip, but the change will be more obvious.
In you want to add colour, each frame will need to have applied a colour gamut. Easily done in photoshop by making the frame RGB and playing with colour balance. If you are not stacking frames, then better clarity can only come from good seeing conditions when taking video and being critical about very good focus.
In regards to the mount, an expectation of 3 hours tracking without any adjustment is a lot to ask. There is either a wrong tracking rate or you are not polar aligned. You can manage the problem by baby sitting the scope. You can place some stick-on markers on your screen at obvious features and make sure you correct the drift before too much movement occurs across the movies. There are solar trackers available but expensive, see here:
http://telescopes.net/store/hutech-h...ar-guider.html
I believe some forum members have also been developing a unit.
I don't know anything about the Meade tracking rates so I'll leave that to others.
I also suggest you might want to join the more specialised Solarchat forum here:
http://solarchat.natca.net/index.php
Ted
