Hi-res AR1041 & 1042 plus full disc with Canon 40D

[Dennis]

Hello,

With a bit of hard work and a lot of help from Avistack, I had a successful session with our Sun today, 24th January 2010.

The early morning session was marred by generally poor seeing, characterised by high frequency, large amplitude scintillations that did not bode well for the remainder of the day. Leaving the gear set up, I periodically ducked in and out of the house to gain some respite from the fierce Sun. Later in the morning, during my 10 minute forays at the ‘scope I noticed that for periods of a couple of seconds or so, the seeing eased, with longer wavelength, smaller amplitude scintillations allowing some quite wonderful detail to poke through.

I unsuccessfully attempted to collect the best of the seeing by pausing/re-starting the recording of the AVI’s but as my Notebook computer only display every n’th frame from the 1024x768 pixel DMK31, it proved nigh impossible to respond to the good seeing in a timely manner. Manually re-starting the recording often lagged behind the moments of best seeing as they did not last for more than 1-3 seconds.

However, a couple of the AVI’s were a few kB larger than the rest and so I processed these to obtain the following results. The full solar disc is a mosaic of 2 frames with the Canon 40D.

All in all, a very satisfying day at the office!

Thanks for looking!

Dennis

[sheeny (Al)]

Lovely work as always, Dennis!

Al.

[Quark (Trevor)]

Congratulations Dennis on this very fine array of images, your Solar work is going from strength to strength. These images are top shelf, love them.

Regards
Trevor

[firstlight (Tony)]

Hi Dennis,

You have been very active and very impressive of late. I have seen some of the images that have been posted onto the front `page of Spaceweather.com and have been very impressed. Here is my own poor effort from today... finally found time to set up the new NEQ6 and the 4 inch and the clouds stayed away!! Vixen 102, 400d, iso 400, 1/3200 sec.

Hope you don't mind that I've posted to your thread.


Cheers
Tony

[iceman (Mike)]

Wow I like those, terrific result Dennis.

[Dennis]

A day in the life of a struggling solar imager!

Here’s AR1041 and AR1042 in less favourable seeing from 25th January. In summary, I managed to grab 4 AVI’s of each region and then:

1. Run each one through Registax to obtain a stack list of the best frames.
2. Save the top 30 to 50 frames as bmps.
3. Open the BMPs in AviStack to align and stack them.
4. Save the output as TIFs.
5. Open up the TIFs in CS4 as Layers.
6. In CS4 Align and Blend the Layers to produce a final image.

The poorer seeing, fewer frames and extensive processing has reduced the fidelity of these final images compared to the previous session.

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by firstlight

Hi Dennis,
You have been very active and very impressive of late. I have seen some of the images that have been posted onto the front `page of Spaceweather.com and have been very impressed. Here is my own poor effort from today... finally found time to set up the new NEQ6 and the 4 inch and the clouds stayed away!! Vixen 102, 400d, iso 400, 1/3200 sec.

Hope you don't mind that I've posted to your thread

Cheers
Tony

Here we go Tony, I did a bit of processing on your image to bring out the solar granulation.

Cheers

Dennis

[TechnoBill]

Dennis
Nice details there. A special thank you for outlining the steps you go through.
Bill D

[seeker372011 (Narayan)]

superb results there Dennis.

[firstlight (Tony)]

Originally Posted by Dennis

Here we go Tony, I did a bit of processing on your image to bring out the solar granulation.

Cheers

Dennis

Wow Dennis. What did you do to get that result? I'm loathe to do too much in case I wreck whatever poor result I get. Thanks again.

[Dennis]

Hi Tony

Glad you liked it. I used the Topaz labs plug in for CS4 to boost the micro contrast which seems to work quite well, without introducing any noticeable processing artefacts.

Have a look in this post for details.

Cheers

Dennis

[Paul Haese]

Cracker images Dennis. Love the granulation you are achieving. Tell (I might have asked this before) me what filter are you using? I was considering getting a Herschel Wedge but I might be better off getting what you have.

[Dennis]

Hi Paul

Thanks!

I use a home made, full aperture filter on the Mewlon 180 made from Baader AstroSolar™ Safety Film. I used the "AstroSolar™ Photo Film" with density D= 3.8 which is for photo use only – it transmits far too much light/radiation (dangerous levels) for visual use.

With the Mewlon 180mm F12 and Tak x1.6 Extender giving an efl of 3450mm at F19.2, I was able to expose at 1/2000 sec with a Gain of approx. 330-350 on the DMK31.

When playing with the Exposure and Gain, I noted that going up to 1/10,000 sec did not appear to improve the seeing, nor did dropping it down to 1/1000 sec make it any worse. The system “noise” was noticeably present with the Gain set to around 850 for 1/10,000 sec compared to 340 at 1/2000 sec, and this is important when there are only a few frames to stack.

These were taken with Brisbane in the Brown and Darker Blue regions of the Jet Stream map at WVEC, 20-30m/s.

Cheers

Dennis

[Paul Haese]

Thanks Dennis.