Four Pane Solar Disk 1st October

[fatwoul]

Four panes stitched together (rather clumsily!). Shot through Coronado PST with Hyperion 8-24 eyepiece, on Atik Titan Mono camera.

It's a start, at least.

[PeterW]

Very good try. Try microsoft ice for idiot proof stitching (most of the time). Slight difference between the frames, I try to keep all the settings and processing steps the same. Th sun was good ody.

Peterw

[fatwoul]

Cheers Peter, I'll give Ice a go. The camera was running Artemic, with Auto-Stretch (the feature which I have grown to hate because of the way it DOES interfere with the data, despite assertions to the contrary!) switched on. That meant that the range of levels was only a few hundred, instead of the 65,000 there should have been, which I think also accounts for the lack of any proms in the data at all.

If the sun has his hat on again tomorrow, I'll give it another bash without Auto-Stretch.

I might also try with Registax 6 now that I've downloaded it, rather than poor old Registax 2!

[PeterW]

you wont see proms when doing disk images and vice versa, you need to do 2 runs and then blend the disk and proms together.... another area that takes patience to get right! when acquiring i make sure i maximise the use of the dynamic range (only 8bits) so that I do not get clipping of the highlights. then a bit of curves and wavelet processing odes the rest. of course more bits meas less frames to play with, so as always a trade off! reg6 blazes through data like a beast!! stops you wanting the clouds to come in to enable you to stand a chance of processing the data that you have just filled your hard drive up with!

All the best

PEterW

[Ibbo!]

How do you stitch it together in ICE?

Cheers

Steve

[PeterW]

Give it the images and it does all the guessing. It can fail if there ate not enough features , like prominence images, but it works well for disk images.

Peterw

[markt]

Good full disk!

[Ibbo!]

I put in 9 frames and it did the top 6

tried it again and it did 5

must be operator error

Thanks

Steve

[Montana]

Great picture and very well put together.

Alexandra

[smerral]

Great start that! I too have the Atik Titan but unfortunately it's the colour cam so I use a b/w webcam for Ha instead. I completely agree about the Artemis autostretch - I had no end of problems initially. I now use Nebulosity for deep sky, and Artemis - with autostretch off - for other stuff.

Once again, nice mosaic!

[fatwoul]

Thanks Smerral. I am SO glad I'm not the only one who thinks that the Auto-Stretch doesn't work as it should. I've been assured by people from Atik that Auto-Stretch shouldn't affect the final saved images, or what they look like in processing, but clearly that isn't the case! Every piece of software I've tried has shown the Auto-Stretch to be saved into the image. But why? I've never had a satisfactory answer as to why it is necessary for the Auto-Stretch to be saved into the EXIF of the image, if it isn't going to be used. Afterall, none of the other settings in that menu (the reticle, negative, or zoom!) are saved into the image. It doesn't make any sense, and I really hope they give that some thought for future releases, because other than that I like using Artemis, and I'd had to have to abandon it. It's just a pain having to remember to switch Auto-Stretch off before I start imaging, having used it to find an object.

Rant over.

[fatwoul]

Good full disk!

Praise indeed, from Brierley Hill! Thank you.

[fatwoul]

Great picture and very well put together.

Alexandra

Thanks Alexandra. It was a bit of a fiddle, but I hope to get plenty more practice!