W' Light processing

[Davey-T]

Had the DSLR set up on SCT to have a shot a Pluto so fitted the Baader solar filter on and took a 1500 frame MVI of the Sun.

Put it through PIPP and reduced it to best hundred frames OK but now put in AS2 best 50% and it's been chuntering away for about 20min's and only reached 30%.

So what should I have done ?

Dave

[Davey-T]

Here's the "finished" image, took an hour to go through AS2 so guess I'm doing something wrong.

Dave

[David Smith]

If you have the DSLR attached any way then you might be better off grabbing ~120 RAW stills and stacking those instead. I've not tried using EOS movie mode to record the Solar disk so don't have any experience processing. I know every time I try converting my 120 RAWS to and avi / ser and then stacking in AS!2 it all goes horribly wrong!

DSLR frames are quite large (as compared to even and ASI174) and AS!2 will take some time to process them. Aligning 120 and then stacking ~50 in Registax takes me about 15 minutes on my AMD hex core machine and a lot longer than that on my celeron lappy. IIRC AS!2 has a maximum frame size out of the box but would have thought it would have just plain refused to work if this was the problem.

[Davey-T]

Thanks David, I was just following a YT video that said take a 1500 frame MVI, will try raw next time.

Dave

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

I always use the DSLR in RAW mode when using it on white light solar. Never tried video mode

[Ewan]

That's a long time to process, I havn't done video with my 600D for quite a while now, I hope you get it sorted Dave.

[Steve Ward]

Probably down to the size of the align-boxes , file size doesn't seem to affect it too much , I convert my RAWs to TIFFs first and they jump from 9Mb to 57Mb but never take long to stack after PIPP has centered and cropped them from 3888 x 2592 to 2650 x 2650 and joined them into an AVI @ 1fps.

I never use align-box size of less than 300 for my full discs , if you have it set low i.e 30-40 there are loads more boxes to process ... that and hundreds of frames will make it very slow indeed.

Very small boxes works well when using a planetary camera but not for DSLR frames .

Recording 'movies' with a DSLR , either with EOSMovieRec or other just captures the Liveview as a series of JPEGs so you're never going to get much detail .

I shoot sets of 100-150 frames at a time but after careful critical inspection by eye (no software does a good enough quality selection in my opinion) I stack just the very best , crispest frames.

This generally means stacking just 20 or so , nothing gained by stacking hundreds of poor quality frames.

And stacking frames from different sets from different times usually creates stacking problems due to the small but significant rotation of the Sun between sets , most commonly encountered on those days where clouds can mean a few minutes between sets shot.

Couple of screenshots to show the time differences , the various procedures don't appear that different ... up until the Map Recombination part , this is stacking 38 frames first with a 300 box and then with a 40 box , note how the align-points jumps from 115 @ 300 to 5864 @ 40 ... !!!

The first MR took just  15 seconds , the second I timed at 9 minutes 57s  ... !

[Davey-T]

Thanks for that Steve, do you capture using low speed continuous or manually ?

Dave

[Steve Ward]

Manually via EOSUtilities.

RAW to TIFF in Canon's DPP that comes bundled with the camera , I batch convert set one while grabbing set two etc.

By eye selection via Reg 5.1 .

[Davey-T]

Thanks, just need the Sun to appear now

Dave