The Sun - 7th May 2013

[David Smith]

Could be the last one for a few days

Shot two sets of ~100 frames. Processed both sets (eventually) but the second set seemed the better of the two although neither set was as sharp as I would have liked.

20130507 by David_The_Bears_Fan, on Flickr

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Could indeed be the last one for the moment. Quite good detail

[Steve Ward]

Looks good to me . . .

You could try picking the best frames from each set and stacking them , seeing as how you're now hooked and well down the slippery slope to fussiness . . .

[JamesF]

Looks good to me, too. I saw in my own image from today that the faculae seemed less well-defined than I'd expect given that the seeing was actually quite reasonable. Steve's image showed the same effect, as does yours. I think the Sun must just be being awkward today

I have noticed however that there seems to be some odd sort of arc running through the middle of your image, from about 10:30 to 8 o'clock. The colour to the left is ever so slightly lighter than to the right. I thought it was my eyes at first, but I'm sure it's there. Did you have one or two out-of-alignment frames that might have stacked badly?

James

[David Smith]

All too true Steve. I have been using DPP's Quick Look feature which I quite like.

Not sure what I did this morning but none of the subs were quite as sharp as I would have hoped.

[David Smith]

I think the Sun must just be being awkward today

That must be it then

Did you have one or two out-of-alignment frames that might have stacked badly?

I did have some issues with stacking today for some reason. Thought I had weeded out all the bad subs but may have missed one somewhere.

[Qualia]

David, your work is so inspiring. Seriously. I don't image but I alwys check my sketches against what you show us. Brilliant stuff and thank you.

[David Smith]

Thanks Qualia :-)

[Montana]

A lovely pic, nice work

Alexandra

[cgarry]

That is a great image. The quality of your solar images has taken a huge jump since you started working with raw images.

Cheers,

Chris

[David Smith]

Thanks Chris. Yes, noticeable step up hence I am committed to sticking with Raws despite some difficulties with the processing. I have both Raw Studio and PIPP up and running now and both are much quicker than running DPP in a Windows VM.

I think I may well add a faster memory card to my camera as this will allow me to capture the source data over a shorter period of time. This reduces the occurrence of the Sun drifiting out of the frame before I have enough subs to create a reasonable stack. With the current standard card it takes me more than 2 minutes to capture 100 frames by which time the Sun has drifted off. When I was shooting jpg's I could capture 120 frames in 40 seconds. This would reliably give me a stack of 80 ish frames

After that I need to look to use my laptop during capture as this should make the focusing easier, but that's a whole 'nother ball game that I have not started on yet!

Shame the weather has taken a turn for the worse, need to practice!

[cgarry]

You can capture 100 frames in 2 minutes? That is fast. It takes me much much longer than that with my 450D and laptop. I shall have to look into capturing directly to a card instead of downloading to PC.

PIPP should be able to add a bit more of a helping hand, especially if you use RegiStax 6 for your stacking:

* Centring and cropping of the sun (This really helps Reg6)

* Equalising the brightness of frames (Again, this helps Reg6)

* Ordering the frames by total brightness to simplify the deletion of cloud affected frames.

I then run the images through PIPP a second time (much faster this time through as the images are already TIFFs) just to reorder the remaining images by quality. This simplifies the process of selecting the sharpest images for stacking. Though of course you could just use RegiStax's quality selection instead of this 2nd PIPP run.

Cheers,

Chris

[David Smith]

I'm looking at a 16gb card with 45mb/s transfer rate, only £15 so if it doesn't improve the process it's not the end of the world. There is a similar card with a 90mb/s transfer rate but that is considerably more expensive and more of a loss if it doesn't work!

Whilst the weather is lack lustre I can play with PIPP as you describe above. At the moment I am just using it to convert to TIFF but cllearly it can do much more!

[cgarry]

I'll be interested to know if it does improve the speed. I suppose I can try out capturing directly to a card while it is cloudy, though I would still use the laptop and BackyardEOS as it makes focusing so much easier.

This example needs bringing up to date as it uses a slightly older version of PIPP, but it does cover using PIPP for solar imaging:

http://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/example-uasge/example3

Cheers,

Chris

[David Smith]

Great link, Thanks. Will let you know what I decide to do about the card and how I get on.

Do you run BYEOS from Linux / Wine?

[cgarry]

Do you run BYEOS from Linux / Wine?

No, I bought a cheap Windows laptop for my capture needs. Wine has come a long way so I do wonder if BYEOS would run with it now...

[David Smith]

Had a play with PIPP this evening. What a great piece of software, makes the Registax process much quicker and PIPP runs really quick as well. This will cut the processing time down I suspect.

[Ibbo!]

Nice result

the seeing for me on the 7th was a bit off as well

Steve

[sologuitarist61]

Excellent image!