Having problems aligning and stacking frames from a solar video.

[coolraiser103]

So I took a nice video on July 11th of the two Sunspots which were about to leave the solar limb. I have prepared a flat to get rid of the dust motes and have preprocessed in PIPP to make make the frames monochrome and use the best 300, but I cannot get the resulting AVI aligned and processed correctly at all.

I've been using an 8" Skyquest Dobsonian (1500mm) and a Celestron Neximage 5 to aquire the videos... The original frames were 1920x1080 pixels, which is a very nice resolution (perhaps a little big.) The attatched frame still has the dust motes in it, and it is also resized, but it gives a general idea of the type of frames I am trying to align.

No matter how I do it in Registax 6 or AutoStakkert, I can't get these frames aligned correctly. Is there a way to align these kind of frames together using one of those two softwares? Thanks.

Using AutoStakkert, this is the reference frame that results, suggesting the problem might be in the alignpoints:

[Steve Ward]

Welcome to the forum ...  

Can you post the video , or pop it in Dropbox so that we can have a look at the footage and be in a better position to help ... 

[Ant]

I regularly have solar avi's that one stacking software can't do for some reason.

Normally throwing it into Registax 5 or 6 solves the problem and it goes through, even though I prefer other stacking software. Sometimes these weird thing just happen. I have three different stacking software installed, so if I get an awkward AVI I have three bites of the cherry.

Ant

[coolraiser103]

Thanks for the welcome! I did hear you guys have a nice community.

As for the video, the frames are huge, so I put it into dropbox (the preprocessed version) so you can see it.

I'm honestly thinking of downsizing it a bit. 573 megs is a lot.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/khv9yo60ujyj87l/004_pipp.avi

As I type it's still uploading so it might be necessary to wait a bit.

[Bizibilder]

Try Registax 5 with a single align-point of 256 over the big spot.  Don't bother with PIPP to start with (nothing wrong with it! It just eliminates one variable) and see what you get.

With a Dob you will get image drift and it may be that an align point in your first frame is outside the alignment area on your last frame.  When this happens the software (whichever you use) gets confused and you get the result shown in your second image.  This can often be the case if you are using multiple align points or an align point too close to the edge of the image.

[coolraiser103]

Scratch that, I have a better one here that isn't so huge:

This one is just over 6 megs so it should be better.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pbe5lf3pljtvqpw/004_pipp%5B1%5D.avi

The way I encoded this one, it looks like someone hit each frame successively with a stick. But at least it gives you an idea of what I'm doing.

[Cornelius Varley]

It might be better to not use PIPP. Having downloaded the smaller file it might be difficult for any stacking program to stack the frames. I think PIPP works better with planetary AVI's where the is a definite centre of gravity for each frame (the planetary disc). Using the program for surface stacking (lunar / solar) might introduce more problems for the final stacking.

[coolraiser103]

All right, so I was able to use the manual alignment in Registax 5.1 to get the best 100 frames aligned. That allowed me to get around the jitteriness of the frames which I made with PIPP (I did it mostly for the purpose of combining several recordings, but I can understand why it was unecessary.) Apparently Registax 5.1 has an optimizer tab I was unaware of that perfects the manual alignment made by human input. So, it actually turned out nicely:

Thanks for helping me out there, guys. I like the visibility of the faculae and the clear dimming of the surface approaching the solar limb.

[Steve Ward]

The problem with PIPP sorting the frames is that you get the best frames jumping around all over the place depending on where they were in the original recording , Chris was hoping to sort a region of interest feature for Solar close-ups that will allow it to centre spots much as it does planets , but he's a busy chap and hasn't got round to it yet ... 

Had a little play with your result to pull a little more detail out , but difficult on a jpeg ... 

Unfortunately you'll always struggle using the dob , what you could try is shooting a decent length AVI nudging the scope as required and the using VirtualDub (  http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/ ) to go through the video and delete those frames that drift too far out of line , this should give Reg a better chance of tracking details. A bit long-winded but worth a try.

[coolraiser103]

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of magic did you perform on that to make it look even better? Did you just sharpen it more, or something else?

Better yet, could I use such a process on my best Saturn image to date?

Saturn July 3 2014 1055PM.bmp

For me, just sharpening it causes more noise, which I guess is acceptable in varying amounts with different people.

I've been using my dob for imaging since January, and before then I didn't do any imaging to speak of. I'd say it works well for me because iCap has the ability to pause during recording, so I can automatically cut out the sections where I am repositioning the telescope. Since June I've been using a 1970s Celestron 5 with an equatorial mount, but the only things I've gotten with it are Mars and Saturn (shown pic is an example) and I have no 5" solar filter to get solar images from it.