Monday's evening sun in Ha (1/7/13) - super prom night

[DrRobin]

Hi,

What a super prom, it first showed up on Saturday and it istill there, this must be one active region.

All pictures Lunt 60 in signle and double stack. DMK41 with a 0.8x FR for the full disc and a 1.5x barlow for the close ups.

I also took enough images for a mosaic, but it is refusing to assemble at the moment.

Robin

Single stack

Double stack

Double stack close up

[David Smith]

What a great set of images Robin. There are some fantastic proms visible at the moment, I had a chance to watch the fireworks over the weekend with the PST but got home too late and missed the clear skies today.

[Steve Ward]

Great set Robin ...

[allcart]

Well done Robin. I'm glad you finally got the sun and the time ti get some images.

[Luke]

Nice set, Robin. The prom closeup is fantastic!

How much drizzle did you use? I've not had any luck with drizzle so far, it seems to break up into jagged pixels when I adjust the tones a lot?

Hope your mosaic works out.

[Montana]

We must have been imaging at pretty much the same time, these are fabulous I see that in the prom close up you have a massive surge prom which I only had a bright bulge on my shot so perhaps this was taken a few minutes after me? (after 18:53?).

Alexandra

[DrRobin]

Hi,

Thanks everyone, last night ended a 7 day stretch of no sun for me.

Alexandra, I set up at 19:10, but my new PC is playing up again and I had to reload the IS drivers and software, so it was 19:22 when I took the single stack full disc images, 19:42 for the double stack full disc (I took three on different settings) and then between 19:52 and 20:06 for the 1.5x images for my mosaic (still processing). The close up of the prom was taken at 20:00.

Robin

[JamesF]

Lovely images. That huge prom is just stunning.

James

[DrRobin]

Hi,

I have stitched together the 6 pane mosaic, mostly by hand, so it's a bit rough at the edges, but it looks like there is more surface detail.

The sun was getting a bit low by the time I finished this (8pm) and I had to wait about 5 minutes in the middle for cloud to clear. I was going to make a second run, but it was already touching the roof of a house across the gardens so it wasn't worth the effort.

Robin

[DrRobin]

Just looked on Gong, sadly the prom has gone today, mind it is completely over cast here today.

Robin

[allcart]

Same here Robin. I really wanted to have a crack at the new AR before it comes right into view.

Not a bad job on the mosaic but it has lost sharpness on the overlaps. I was playing with my mosaic data last night to see if I could improve anything and I noticed that photomerge does exactly the same thing, so its not just you. Considering you manually merged the frames, you did a pretty good job of it.

[DrRobin]

To my surprise (and delight) Autostitch has made a better job of stitching the mosaic. I had a fiddle with the settings, not really knowing what they do, but it took around 3 times as along to produce the image shown below.

Robin

[allcart]

Better. does autostitch only work with jpgs. ?

[DrRobin]

Hi Allan,

Yes, only jpeg is supported. It is a demo of the software. Commercial packages built on their stitching engine are Autopano (Windows) and Calico (MAC). Interesting as I download a demo copy of Autopano and it won't stitch the mosaic either.

If I try a mosaic I process the files in to TIFF with AS!2 and also sharpen them to JPEG. I use MS ICE on the unsharpened TIFFs or JPEGs to see if that will stitch, if it doesn't I try Autostitch on the sharpened JPEGs.

I reckon my Lunt 60 with double stack might be struggling to correctly illuminate a DMK41 with 1.5x barlow and I might try my DMK21 next time. It will take at least 4 times the number of panes, but can run up to 4 times as quick.

Robin

[JamesF]

There's also "hugin" for stitching images together. I've never tried it for solar images, but it's what I used for my Stellarium landscape.

James

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Lovely images. I stood in awe on my doorstep as I watched those amazing proms. Wonderful fireworks

[DrRobin]

I have tried Hugin on solar and despite identifying loads of good alignment points it just will not stitch a final image without huge amounts of distortion. It complains that the FoV is too small to calculate/optimise the settings. Pity as Hugin is really just a front end for the stitching tools, but it does look as though it can't cope with the very small FoV of solar images.

Robin

[JamesF]

That's a shame. It worked rather nicely for my panorama, but that's rather a different case

James

[DrRobin]

I wish I could get Hugin to work, it looks like it has great potential, but unless I can find a solution for the small FoV upsetting the optimisation I don't think it is going to be any good.

Perhaps I should start another thread?

Robin