Improving my proms

[Iainp]

I'm using the examples on the forum to try and capture as much "smoky" detail in prominences as possible.  I have a long way to go, but this one from this afternoon is a definite improvement on earlier efforts, helped in part by the fact that it was a particularly big one

[David Smith]

They look pretty good to me Iain

[Pete Presland]

look pretty good to me, what was your set up and capture details?

[NickK]

Fine details need a high signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. The more frames you can get to differentiate noise and signal the better.

Solar objects change over time, so a sensitive camera sensor coupled with a shorter exposure time and then running a high frame rate is the way to go - adding active cooling (i.e. a astro camera with set point temperature) will allow you reduces the noise further. The set point helps maintain the same S/N reduction over long exposure runs over the course of the day.

You should look at lucy richardson deconvolution - lots of packages offer this but most seems to favour wavelets at the default process (i.e. registax).

[Montana]

A great prom, looks like a swan on the right :)

Alexandra

[Iainp]

Hi all thanks. I'll look into what you say re imaging Nick. All advice welcome!

At present I'm just experimenting with solar imaging, as I'm complete newbie to it.   I'm using the Lunt 80mm with 2X Barlow and a colour camera, the Skyris 618C.  I realise colour is not the the way to go, and plan to upgrade to mono soon, but not sure which one to go for or how much I need to spend.

Exposure: I try to use as low a gain as possible, and exposure times of 1/50 - 1/100 second at least. The above was a fainter one, I think, as the sun was quite low with some haze so it was probably around 1/30 second. (I delete the files once used, as running out of disc space so don't have the original data)  I'm aiming for 2000+ frames per capture but haven't yet worked out how to align the tripod properly yet (it keeps asking me for stars but I don't have any in the day...) so sometimes have to make do with 1000 frames if the image is drifting a lot.  Processing in AS2! or Registax so far.  For mosaics I use the superb and free Microsoft ICE which stitches any number of panes together in seconds perfectly.  Cheers, Iain 

[Stardust]

that's quite a a nice prom image, I'm only getting to grips with this myself, I'll be trying the Lucy decon when my PC comes back.

I've been taking 1000 frames and only using 10% with a QHY5L-IIM which I'm told is oversampling, but we have what we have to work with, stacking in Registax.

Yet to try a mosiac.