Hughsie

The morning started with a lot of haze, warm with a temperature of 19℃ with the wind coming in from the South West at 4 mph and 75% humidity. Below are three images taken that morning; The usual full disc showing AR12829. 3 ms exposure, gain = 0. Best 25% of 1,000 frames. A close up using a 3x Barlow of AR12829. 9.5 ms exposure, gain = 80. Best 25% of 1,000 frames. Prominence located on the south west limb of the disc. 20 ms exposure, gain = 190. Best 25% of 500 frames. Full disc and AR12829 calibrated with 50 flat frames.

This is more of a partial eclipse true story so apologies to anyone expecting to see more pictures of the event. It’s Thursday morning and the time is 10.10 am. All my solar gear is outside and I am inside the house as it’s a work day and I continue to work from home as I have done for the last 15 months. There is a team Zoom call coming up at 10.30 am so I have remotely linked my desktop inside with my laptop outside so I can watch the eclipse unfold. My boss is aware of my little hobby so he knows I will be flicking to and fro with Zoom and Microsoft Remote Desktop and is keen to see what is going on as well. Outside in the big wide world I have friends who are also eager to learn if I can view the eclipse as they are all clouded out and so I took the screenshot below of the eclipse through my camera linked to SharpCap and shared it with them across WhatsApp. Fast forward to 6pm. Work has finished and I have ventured down to our local for a pint and find my mate Wim and his son sat in the beer garden. Wim is a big friendly Dutch guy and he greets me by slapping me on the back and telling me what a great eclipse picture I sent through, then promptly starts laughing. I sit down with them both and Wim explained that when he received the picture he was in hospital. You see he has been having a problem with one of his eyes and having been to see his optician he was then referred to the local hospital for a closer examination. My WhatsApp message came through whilst he was waiting in the hospital. Being a sharing and caring kind of guy, Wim then sent the message to his wife but it contained just the image, not the text which, as it turned out, would have avoided Mrs Wim nearly having a coronary! Let me explain. Mrs Wim being neither interested in Solar Photography and no where nearly as qualified as an ‘eye doctor’ jumped to the conclusion that as her husband was at hospital he must have sent through a picture of his eye examination. It had to be right? There is a white disc; maybe the back of an eyeball and there is a reticule aiming whatever is looking at her loving husband's eye on the screen too. However, Mrs Wim doesn’t have any vision problems and she is immediately drawn to the chunk of white disc that is missing. It can only be one thing as far as she is concerned. Cancer. She’s immediately on the phone, what’s wrong with your eye, you have cancer there is black mark on your eye Wim (you can imagine the call) but can you imagine her relief when he laughs and calmly explains that it is a photo of the solar eclipse (that she is totally unaware of) taking place this morning! Well, that’s my memorable eclipse story and whilst I did get clouded out before the maximum, I will never forget this one. Enjoy the rest of the weekend everyone and remember the moral of this story - communication is a wonderful thing and sometimes pictures do not speak louder than words alone! John

Great images as always. Lovely stuff.

I am really enjoying all the images of the partial solar eclipse that members have posted here on the forum. There looks to be a lot more people interested in observing/imaging the Sun which is great to see. However, I am still a few days behind and so today I am sharing a selection of images and time lapses from 7 June 2021. The morning started well with a clear sky and no clouds at all. Temperature was 21℃ when I started imaging with a breeze of 10 mph coming in from SSE and humidity of 54%. Seeing was fairly steady. First up is AR12829 classified as DAO. I stacked the best 5% from 3,000 frames in AutoStakkert 3. Exposure 8ms, gain 40, filling 60% of the histogram. Next is a time-lapse of AR12829. Nothing spectacular in terms of flares but I love seeing the motion of the chromosphere. 150 Ser files were recorded containing 500 frames and the best 25% were stacked per Ser file. Imaging started at 12 55 18 UT and was completed at 14 20 07 UT. Reviewing each file I whittled this down to 136 TIF files. We then have a prominence on the south west limb with an estimated altitude of 50,000 km. Finally there is the time lapse of the same prominence. 150 Ser files recorded per above. Imaging started at 10 49 11 UT and finished at 12 30 50 UT. 50 flats were taken using an old sandwich bag held down with a lacky band over the scope. I am now breaking in a new sandwich bag as the current one is looking pretty ropey! Thank you for checking in.

Lovely time lapses. I know from experience that a lot of work and processing has gone into a huge amount of data so bravo!

The 6th June started as a reasonably clear morning with some patches of high cloud. Wind was SSW at 1mph and even though it was just after 7am it was a warm start to the day at 20℃. During the session clouds started to build up in the west heading east to ultimately cover the Sun leading to the image run coming to an end. Captured on this day and shown below are; Full solar disc both inverted and not. AR12829 classified as CRO. AR12829, AR12827 classified as HSX plus an area of plage without a sun spot. Prominence on south west limb. Equipment Lunt 60mm TH⍺/B1200 CPT. ZWO ASI174mm. SkyWatcher EQ6R Pro. Altair Astro 3x barlow used for Active Regions. Camera Settings Full Disc - Exposure 2.1 ms, gain 0. AR12829/AR12827 - Exposure 14 ms, gain 30. Prominence - Exposure 65 ms, gain 120. Data 1,000 frames captured in Ser format. Best 25% stacked in AutoStakkert 3. Curves adjustment applied in ImPPG. PixInsight - DynamicCrop, DynamicBackgroundExtraction, CurvesTransformation, RestorationFilter, Resampled image size, Crop for framing and Annotated. Prominence - 500 frames captured in Ser format. Best 25% stacked in AutoStakkert 3 then the following processes were used in PixInsight - DynamicCrop, CurvesTransformation, RestorationFilter, RangeSelection to create mask to cover disk, CurvesTransformation to add colour then Resample to resize image. Thank you for checking in.

A selection of images taken showing the activity on the Chromosphere on 5 June 2021. AR12829 developing nicely and AR12827 slowly out of view but still very active. Thank you for dropping by.

I use an old HP laptop with an i3 processor, 16gb of ram and a 500gb Crucial SSD with one USB 3.0. I use a USB hub into which the camera and mount are connected. Using a ASI174mm with Sharpcap pro I can get 160/170 FPS on a full disc with no Barlow/Powermate attached. FPS will drop with a 3x Barlow attached as I have to raise exposure times and drops further with a 5x powermate. My capture software of choice is Sharpcap pro, costs £10 p.a. In the standard Sharpcap 1gb of ram is set aside to hold high frame rate images in the memory. With the Pro version you can allocate half your ram to holding high frame rate images which helps in avoiding dropped frames.

Hi Steve, One option to is take an image of the disc filling the histogram to 60/70% as you have suggested and capture, say 1,000 frames. Then increase the camera gain to say 180/200 and increase the exposure time c12 ms works for me. What you want to avoid is the disc ‘bloating’ so adjust the gain keeping the disc the same size then adjust the exposure time to bring out the detail of the proms. Stack each file then bring both into Photoshop, copy the disc on to the prom image and set the light to difference then adjust the position of the disc so one overlays the other. MalVeaux has some great YouTube video tutorials. This is one I sometimes work to plus he has posted an up to date one here in Solar Imaging section. It’s the first pinned subject.

Only a short session was possible on 4 June as no sooner had I started the clouds made an appearance and that was it. Here is a budding AR12829 with an impressive crackling flare along with a waning AR12827 but still striking with all the detail in the Chromosphere surrounding it. Finally, there is a Jaffa Cake to finish. A five pane mosaic of the full solar disc taken with a 3x barlow.

A right old mix bag here. I usually work on the basis that less is more but I got carried away. Here are prominences, active regions close up and wider views along with one which captures prominences, filaments and an active region. Enjoy the remainder of the weekend.

When was the 31st May? All these clear days are blurring into one and I now find myself with an active Sun, a back log of images and not enough time to do anything about it. What a nice problem to have 😃 Well, here is AR12827 presented as a full disc image, through a x3 barlow and a x5 Powermate.

Just waiting on the clouds to clear here. Nice captures, that is one beast of an AR

It’s a bit of a long video but the link below goes through how to use ImPPG. I tend to disable the sharpening tool as I find there are easier more controllable methods for sharpening in other applications. However, the curve adjustment tool is brilliant and well worth the time following this tutorial. https://youtu.be/-zD4EIGBess

Damian, they are lovely crisp images. Thank you for sharing.

Below are a selection of solar images taken on 30 May 2021. During this session I decided to give the ‘Seeing Monitor’ tool a go which is available in Sharp Cap Pro. This attempts to calculate the seeing conditions and represent them in bar graph format over time. It automatically calculates the median position of the ‘seeing’ and you can set a threshold on the chart. You can then either have the tool commence an image run when seeing is over the threshold, potentially giving you better images, however, you also capture frames if the seeing drops below the threshold. Another option is to start commencing when the threshold is reached or exceeded and stop recording when the seeing drops below the threshold level. It then restarts when the threshold is reached again. Sound good? I think if you have stable seeing conditions then it will help but then if seeing is stable you will get no better or worse a view. Where seeing is variable, which is more likely the case, it could help. In my session I found the seeing was so variable that recording paused for 20 - 30 seconds which in solar imaging is a lifetime! Images (best 25% of 1,000 frames) Full disc - exposure time 2 ms, gain 0. AR12827 - 07 45 26 UT exposure time 16 ms, gain 30. 3 x barlow used. Unnamed AR - 07 49 11 UT exposure time 16 ms, gain 30. 3x barlow used. AR12827 - 08 20 47 UT exposure time 21 ms, gain 95. 5x Powermate used. AR12827 - GIF you can almost imagine the solar wind whipping across the chromosphere and here the magnetic lines are revealed by the movement of plasma between the sun spots. Equipment Lunt 60mm THa/CPT1200. ZWO ASI174mm. SkyWatcher EQ6R Pro. Altair Astro x3 barlow and Tele Vue Powermate x5. SharpCap Pro. Several cups of tea. Processing Frames stacked in AutoStakkert3! Initial curves adjustment in ImPPG. PixInsight - Dynamic crop to remove stacking artefacts; DBE to remove haze; RestorationFilter to sharpen; final CurvesTransformation; Crop for framing and Annotation for gumpf on the image.

Here is the link to Chucks Astrophotography channel on YouTube where he talks about this method. I’m no expert but I’m an expert copier!

Ser or AVI, it’s a personal choice. ImPPG is really fussy about alignment. The GIF above is a fraction of the actual size and is heavily cropped. Try and crop the TIF files and see if that works. The smaller amount of TIF data the better. Also, you could try aligning on the disc. Personally I think this produces a slightly worse result but is an option as a last resort.

I use SharpCap Pro for acquiring ser video files. Autostakkert3! where I stack the ser files to create TIF images. TIF images are taken into PixInsight where I crop, sharpen, colour the images and tinker with them. PixInsight allows you to work on one image then batch process the lot with the processing settings you used on the single image - less hard work Then from PixInsight I load the processed TIF’s into the free software ImPPG. Here they are aligned with each other. I then review each TIF and delete any bad frames. Finally, the TIF’s are loaded into the free software PIPP, I then select the Animation Tab and Output Tabs and choose the video format I want, frame rate and where to save the file then select process and its done.

Second time-lapse this time from Monday 31st May 2021. The GIF is represented by 150 x 500 frame video with a 60s gap between each recording. Best 25% of each 500 frame video was stacked in AS3! to create 150 TIF images which were then processed through PixInsight, ImPPG and PIPP. Following equipment was used; Lunt 50mm THa/B1200CPT. ZWO ASI174mm camera. SkyWatcher EQ6R Pro. 5x Tele Vue Powermate. SharpCap Pro. The prominence was positioned on the south western limb and I commenced capturing 07:21 and finished 09:27 UT.

Superb images as always.

I have done one of these before using Photoshop but I binned PS and the monthly fee a long time ago. Recently I was watching Chuck’s Astrophotography Channel on YouTube and came across his workflow for using AS3!, PixInsight, ImPPG and PIPP. The process and image container processes in PixInsight make this a breeze for working on a lot of individual images so I thought I would have a go. Anyway, here is a short time-lapse made up of 34 images with 60 seconds in-between. Images taken between 08.44 and 09.18 UT. Watch out on the left of the prom for the plasma shooting off into space. More to come when I have the time to process. Thanks for checking in, John

A sample of images captured today in poor seeing and with a very bad hangover. AR12824 is disappearing around the western limb and I’m disappearing to a dark room.

Thank you Bob.

Thank you Neil, the Sun does appear to be hotting up!