The Sun - 29th Mar 2014

[David Smith]

Hazy skies this morning but I thought it worth a shot and seems to have come out quite respectable. Shot 136 x 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Stacked 21 after PIPP had done it's thing and then followed up with a tweak by the GIMP.

[JamesF]

Steve seems to have started this trend for "extreme solar imaging"

A good effort through hazy skies.  No dice here as yet.  It's sufficiently "hazy" that I can't actually tell where the Sun is

James

[sologuitarist61]

Great image, down here it would be nice to just see the sun occassionally!

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice image. I wanted to do some H-alpha imaging this morning but the tracking system wouldn't play ball. I'll try again when the battery had recharged.

[Bizibilder]

Well done - just waiting for the haze to lift here as well.

[David Smith]

Had another go with the PST / DSLR / Barlow setup. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination but getting passable results. This one is 71 stacked frames of 1/400th second @ ISO 100, very little in the way of processing - just a touch of wavelets and come unsharp mask in GIMP. It's scaled down 50% to make it more presentable I give up trying to add colour, just ends up looking like marmalade

Any thoughts, comments, hints, tips welcomed

[JamesF]

I'm still amazed that the DSLR does that good a job with the PST.  Considering that you're only using a quarter of the pixels I think that's quite impressive.

James

[David Smith]

It's my kind of imaging - fairly simple and not too involved. Don't think I am ever going to have either the time, the kit or the inclination to get too involved in this, especially with the PST which isn't the easiest tool to work with for imaging. I did look at mono camera, new laptop and all that but do not have the appetite to spend circa £700 only to struggle and not progress with it.

I will continue to play with the process and see if I can get a sharper image without the bright spot but suspect the latter is a result of the PST's sweet spot.

[JB80]

Nice efforts David.

Same sort of thing here today, it's a mixture of moisture and dust haze in the air and by the time I got around to it conditions weren't great.

Not bad PST shot too, did you separate the R channel or just convert it to b&w?

[Steve Ward]

Nice shot David ... 

There's nowt extreme about it James , if you see it you shoot it , regardless , and just treat the haze and cloud like 'noise' and let Uncle Reg deal with it .... 

That does of course require seeing it , a somewhat easier thing in some places than others ...  

[David Smith]

Thanks all

Not bad PST shot too, did you separate the R channel or just convert it to b&w?

Just converted the subs to mono in PIPP Jarrod. Will try pulling the R channel at some point, see if that cleans the image up at all.

[JB80]

If you still have the original subs then do that, it's been a while since I tried with the dslr but basically you can throw away the G & B channels as the R is the only one that has any detail in it. Kev(photosbykev) has a good read on his website about it.

Worth trying though, don't worry about stacking at first just try with a single RAW straight from the camera and see if it helps.

[Montana]

Wow! that's a beauty and I looove the Halpha well done :) and 3 bows  too

Alexandra

[DrRobin]

Very nice David a good results for the misty conditions. A nice Ha image as well.

Robin