Well I never knew I could do that! Venus Transit from Australia.

[ASIGN_Baz]

Usually when I take a photo of the sun through my Baader film and ED120 or ED80, I get something like picture number one.

Tonight, after all kinds of problems getting four different stacking programs to play the game, I ended up stacking eight of these frames and produced image number two.

Unfortunately there isn't enough memory on my laptop for these programs to process RAW or TIFF in any great number, if at all, so I had to convert to JPEG (crappy alternative) and go with that.

Still, I'm surprised and amazed at the result. Even though I lost a little of the outer limb of the sun, I can see the surface granulation that I have never seen before, as well as much clearer and sharper sunspots.

I'm going to clean all my glass surfaces and start practising for the eclipse coming up in November. Hopefully I should be full-bottle on solar imaging by then.

1.

2.

[Black Knight]

It's a great result though

[yeti monster]

It's quite surprising what a jpg image contains, I gave up on raw as I didn't really see the point in faffin' around with them.

I still hold a glimmer of hope that I might make the journey down under for the eclipse, but I'm not holding my breath....

[Photosbykev]

Good results Baz

I m surprised by the comment on not using raw because of the hassle. Yes you do need to spend time processing them but they contains significantly more detail and colour information that a jpg does. They are a world apart and capturing a once in a lifetime event deserves the effort

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk. Blame Apple for the typos

[yeti monster]

Deleted 'cos it was hi-jacking the thread!

.... if I were a proper tog, then perhaps I'd be more inclined to use raw, suffice to say, I'm more than happy with my transit pics and a good deal of my regular photomography. I use a netbook to do my pp, and when I use the Canon software, I need to change screen resolution, which is a pita to begin with.

I may, perhaps, someday, give raw another go, but then again, I may perhaps, someday, buy an iPhone too....

[Nicho]

Great image ! You must be very proud .. I would be . Out of intrest how did you stack your shots in the end ? . I have about 10 pictures myself which I would like to have a go at .

Thx

Nick

[ASIGN_Baz]

Great image ! You must be very proud .. I would be . Out of intrest how did you stack your shots in the end ? . I have about 10 pictures myself which I would like to have a go at .

Thx

Nick

I converted them all to JPEG and then stacked them in Maxim DL Essentials, before exporting them to Photoshop Elements 6 for final tweaking. I just wish I had the system memory resources to do the same with RAW files.

[Montana]

Excellent images and congratulations on getting to see Venus

Alexandra

[Ant]

Very nice Barry, glad you managed to see it.

DSS will handle RAW frames - I'm sure that it does... Having said that I bet your RAW are much bigger than mine :

Ant

[MidnightSun]

Nice one......

[ASIGN_Baz]

Very nice Barry, glad you managed to see it.

DSS will handle RAW frames - I'm sure that it does... Having said that I bet your RAW are much bigger than mine :

Ant

Thanks guys.

Ant, my RAWs from the 5DMKII are around 21Mb. It's not the program though I think. It's my old chockablock PC running out of memory resources to do these tasks.

[Steve Ward]

You can also stack them in Registax , V5 takes RAW files.

[ASIGN_Baz]

You can also stack them in Registax , V5 takes RAW files.

Thanks Steve. Tried that too...but I'm out of system memory resources.

[Ant]

That a big difference, my RAWs only only about 6Mb each... Could you just increase the amount of RAM? It's not that expensive anymore. But at 21Mb each even 3Gb RAM probably won't be enough

Ant

[ASIGN_Baz]

That a big difference, my RAWs only only about 6Mb each... Could you just increase the amount of RAM? It's not that expensive anymore. But at 21Mb each even 3Gb RAM probably won't be enough

Ant

Correct sir! My machine is getting so old now, it is really starting to slow down. I may as well spend a couple of grand on a machine which is designed to handle large image tasks. This one was not. It's an off-the-shelf Dell laptop and I've got so many image handling programs running on it, plus all my website and internet stuff, image storage and all the drivers for my telescopes, mounts and cameras. Poor thing is really working hard.

[sheri_barri]

Very nice image. You should be proud of that, and Venus is the icing on the cake!