Tuesdays best Ha

[allcart]

Had a pretty good session between clouds yesterday, but the end results were a bit disappointing. I took over an hour of animation that would not align when processed. I spent 3 hours fiddling and manually aligning last night and left the comp running so I could continue this morning. Imagine my shock when I found the comp had restarted overnight and I lost all my work. Grrr. So I started again and found a better way of aligning the images only to find that the big prom barely flickered over that hour period. Grrr. I might as well have just taken one shot.

So here is my effort for Tuesday.

A not very brilliant full disc.

20-08-13 full disc by allcart2, on Flickr

And the large prom.

20-08-13 prom colour by allcart2, on Flickr

[Montana]

These are absolutely fantastic well worth the effort

The key to an animation is finding a mark on your laptop screen, Andy Devey puts a blob of marker pen in a spot. Then keep a prominent feature of your prom always at that spot each time you take an avi for your animation. Then process all your frames. It then takes 10 seconds to align them all in Registax 5. I tend to repeat the align and save three times just to get perfection. Then place in your program to create a giff, I use Photoshop and crop off all the black edges before saving. It doesn't take long to make the giff, the lengthy process is stacking all your avis to get the frames.

Alexandra

[JamesF]

Plenty of activity there to see, so well worth the effort I think.

James

[DrRobin]

Great shot of the prom.

If you take full disc shots, PIPP will auto align the images and even create the AVI. I used it to create the AVI of my recent trip to Spain.

However, I then wanted to add titles and these gave an offset, so I created a mask in a new layer (Paint.net) around the first image, deleted the first image then saved as a template. All I then had to do was import each of the subsequent images in to the template, align them with the mask, hide the mask and then save a jpeg. I then used PIPP to create the AVI. It takes a bit of effort, depending on how many frames you have, but gives a nice result.

Robin

[allcart]

Thanks for the tips Alex and Robin. I just set up the scope and let the sequence run. I didn't make any positional adjustments to the scope during the sequence. Perhaps that was my error as the image shifted over the hour and aligning was a pain to do. It seems I was a bit early with the imaging session as the big prom put on a nice display after 1.30pm so I am told.

These pics look a bit green on my lappy, but were definately more red on my calibrated screen.

[David Smith]

Great stuff Allan. Love the full disk.