Ha Solar mosaic

[anthony]

Howdy,

Looking for any help really. Lets call this a work in progress.

Lovely weather recently and so on Sunday I set aside responsibilities as a father to get out my too infrequently used solar gear.

Scope is Lunt LS60 T pressure tuned and the camera is a DMK 21 (mono 618 chip). Capture was using the supplied IC capture. I am more familiar with this program so am sticking with it for now.

I tried to set this up as a 6 pane mosaic to get plenty of overlap. For each surface shot I also did a few overexposed AVIs hoping to eventually blend together a high full disk with prominences.

Anyhows, this took time and my lovely clear skies started getting full cloud and wispy cloud and to get a decent histogram I had to play with with gamma, gain and exposure.

Autostakkert2 was used to stack the AVIs on the laptop and I used PS CS3 on my iMac to stitch the images together. File - Automate - Photomerge.

I have flattened this image to save as a jpeg and post. Prior to flattening I was able to play with each merged frame individually with levels and curves but to no avail. I was running round in circles chasing areas of contract that never matched!

Is the differing brightness across the panes just due to the exposure settings or is there something else that can be tweaked?

Is there any hope for an image like this or do I make a few secondhand sales to fund a new DMK41!? (wanted ad placed but no reply)

Any thoughts or gentle guidance much appreciated!

[Bizibilder]

Try assembling the mosaic in Microsoft ICE - It should work with Ha pictures and will "auto" contrast to get rid of those differences. Steve Ward posted this video link that he had found

which seems to make sense. I must admit I've not followed it as I don't do Ha but it should at least be a starting point for you.

[anthony]

Hi Roger,

Cheers for that. I had found that video. The PS stuff is in CS5 and uses a pathway with different options than what is available in CS3. Specifically, File - Scripts - Load files into stack and instead of giving me a list of files CS3 just plasters each of the 6 images on top of each other with no ability to shift them about. I'll go back and watch it through again.

Trying right now to get MS ICE to do what I want!

[allcart]

My photomerge mosaics never come out like that. I use a DMK31 and can get a full disc in 3 shots, but I prefer 4. I will shoot more frames if time allows just to have a choice later. When I set up for a run, I orientate the camera so that the sun moves horizontally across the frame. That way I can just press one button to move left right or up and down. I tune the etalon and focus first, then set the gamma and exposure to get the histogram slightly more than 127 but not too peaked. I aim for a slightly lighter exposure as compared to a darker one.

I frame the first shot and take the capture. Press the appropriate button and frame the next shot with a decent overlap and start the capture. Then do the same for the remaining shots. The delay between shots is minimal providing clouds don't delay things. I only capture for 1 minute max, but at 30 frames a second, I stop at 1500 frames. I can shoot a 6 pane mosaic in about 6 minutes. I do not alter any camera settings between shots, and i don't shoot separate exposures for proms. I can bring out the proms in the processing. I only stack frames above 90% quality even if its only 5 from 1500.

I stack in Autostakkert2 as well , and then I choose the best shots and run them straight through photomarge using the auto and blend together mode. Thats it. All processing is done in CS5. Here is an unprocessed 10 pane mosaic from the weekend.

Unprocessed 10 pane mosaic by allcart2, on Flick

You will notice that the frames are blended together, not just aligned as in your original post.