Zakalwe

No, not on the L60 and ASI 178. I'm pleased about that as I recently purchased the 178 camera to get quick full disc images. The lunt is ideally suited to grabbing quick data as it is so easy and quick to tune. Being able to fit the full disc onto the chip was a big factor in opting for the 178. If I Barlow it then I get pretty bad NRs. On my Quark and ASI174 I have to use a tilt adapter.

Thank you. Yes, it is.

That looks nice! Darks? I've never bothered with that. You can always replace the background with a layer with a nice radial gradiant!

Nice details. Looks like a tricky capture!

Looks like you're being a bit heavy-handed with the curves adjustment in ImPPG, to me. Also, use the "Adaptive" setting. It's very powerful when you want to bring out the proms. It allows you to set a different sharpening level for the data that's buried near the black point in the image. It also allows you to "feather" the sharpening so it ramps up as the data gets stonger. This helps to control the noise in the background

Hi Nicolas, To be honest we seem to use similar workflows. I've noticed a couple of differences though: In Autostakkert I always use "Place APs in a grid" and modify the Min Bright value to ensure that APs are placed near the solar limb. This results in many thousands of APs, but I find that it gives me the sharpest image across the disc. I think this is a throwback to the way I process Lunar images. It certainly lengthens the processing time, but it's worth it. In ImPPG I always sharpen. I set the Sigma in both the LR and Unsharp masking panels to roughly the same, usually between 1.3xxx and 1.8xxx. I tend to apply a lot of USM..anywhere from 5 to 9. However subtlety is needed here.....I dislike when the spicules start to thicken. I like to keep these as fine as possible. Its very easy to go too far, so I like to stay on the slightly softer side. The High Pass filter in step 4 does a great job of making the spicules and details "pop". I also use ImPPG to invert part of the images. Personally I think that an inverted disc blending into "normal" proms looks the most pleasing. In Photoshop I rarely use UnSharp Masking. I tend to correct the levels on the image and then duplicate the layer. Set the new layer blending mode to Soft Light and then apply a High Pass filter. To sharpen the spicules I will use a low setting, usually under 3 pixels. I sometimes repeat this and use a much higher value to affect the overall disc. The layer opacity can be altered to suit. These layers are flattened and Levels corrected. For colourisation I use Ken Crawfords Photoshop action "Solar Bright" Ive learned a lot from Ken's tutorials. I always spend a lot of time fiddling with the Shadows/MidTones/Highlights to get the colours how I like them. I get a lot of inspiration from the colour choices that Alan Friedman uses (though I wish that I had his skills!)

Wall to wall cloud here too now 😡

A nice palindromic date! Caught this before the clouds inevitably rolled in this morning. 20_6_20 Full Disc Inverted Pseudo Colour by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr 20_6_20 Full Disc Inverted Mono by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr Lunt L60, double stacked with 50mm etalon. ASI178 mono camera Stacked in AS!3, sharpened in ImPPG

If it would cost more than £20 to replace the camera then you'd be better off with a sheet of solar film.

Thats a big no! Your finderscope will concentrate any IR or UV light getting through the film. A sheet of Baader solar film is less than £20. Do you really value your eyesight less than that?

Nice animation. ImPPG is great for aligning and cropping multiple frames. It can then be used to apply sharpening across those frames as a batch-process. https://github.com/GreatAttractor/imppg/blob/master/README.md

CCD cameras like the old DMKs were much less prone to generating NRs. Mind you, they also had tiny sensors with not a lot of real estate to be affected. Drifting can work as long as the rings aren't very strong. It's a waste of sensor real-estate though. And in some scenarios, drift is the last thing that you want to happe. For example, I can just about squeeze a full disk onto the 178 chip when using my Lunt 60mm. Any drift whatsover and I lose part of the image which means back to mosaics. I bought the camera to specifically remove the need for mosaics! The best outcome is to get rid of them at source. Tilt adjusters are a powerful tool in kitbag for achieving just this. I have my adjuster at the minimum needed tilt as tilt can introduce an uneven focal plane which can show up on big sensors. Any faint residual rings can be removed with an artificial flat-field https://photographingspace.com/tag/artificial-flats/

Yep....NRs can appear on one camera and not on the other. The worst NRs that I have ever experienced was when I mounted an ASI1600 on my Lunt L60.

Stunning images of the filaprom!

Flats work great when the Sun fills the FoV. Well worth doing. Televue PowerMates are a pain for generating NRs too. There's the problem with trying to create flats when the Sun doesn't fill the chip. Even with cling film you do not get even illumination across the FoV. The flats then under correct in parts of the image. Personally I never use flats unless I'm using the Quark or barlowing the Lunt 60mm for this very reason.

Imaging at 1900mm and f9 is a tough gig...

The data can't be that great as AS!3 would stack it. You need to solve the NRs to get good data...they can't be solved afterwards (well, they sorta can be solved with artificial flats, but it is far better to solve them before stacking.) Believe me, you don't. Registax is ancient technology (last updated 8 years ago). It is slow, clunky, awkward to use and uses outdated algorithms (for colour stacking). Autostakkert is leagues ahead of it. You're trying to run before you can walk. Fix the NRs and be confident that you can acquire, stack and process single images first, before you waste hours trying to acquire, stack and process tens of images to make animations.

Also, cut down the number of frames. 3000 is way too much... Don't forget that the surface of the Sun is incredibly dynamic. Spicules and proms are moving at many thousands of miles per hour and a too-long avi file can blur them.

Flats are very hard to get right on partial discs. Do you have a lot of drift in the avi files?

I agree with all of the above. Get guiding and rapidly follow that up with a dedicated cooled astro cam, either OSC or mono. The difference in quality in the data produced by a cooled astro cam compared to a DSLR really is a massive difference. Having lots of low noise data with good star shapes makes it much easier to learn the dark art that is image processing. The scope is such a small part of the overall DSO imaging malarkey..in fact it can be argued that it's possibly the least important bit. Having a decent mount, autoguiding and low noise data are an order of magnitude more important than a fancy triplet. If I had my time again then I would have ditched the many nights trying to use a DSLR unguided. The camera just wasn't sensitive enough and without guiding I was dumping more subs than I was keeping. Then the frustration of trying to learn how to process with noisy data. The first night that saw the data from a OSC cooled camera I nearly wept with frustration at how much energy was wasted messing with a DSLR.

The Starship will be able to do deliver many metric tonnes down to the surface.

They are in such low orbits that they will de-orbit naturally in a few years. Each sat is also fitted with an ion thruster that will be used to de-orbit Starlink sats that are end-of-life. Even if the think completely fails it will de-orbit naturally.

AR 2765 Mono by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr AR 2765 Pseudo Colour by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr 13th June 2020 Prom Normal Disc by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr Inverted Prom Pseudo Colour by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr Quark Chromo on Esprit 120 refractor and ASI 174 camera. FD Normal Disc Inverted Proms by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr FD Inverted Disc Normal Proms by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr FD Normal Disc Inverted Proms Pseudo Colour by Stephen Jennette, on Flickr Lunt L60 pressure tuned, double-stacked with 50mm etalon, ASI178 camera

An excellent camera.

Ive been using Quarks with triplets for years. Currently using an Esprit 120 for 3 years and an Altair Astro 115 before that. No external ERF. Cemented objectives are absolutely a no-go zone.