Solar scope's last hurrah! 31/08/20

[Yawning Angel]

Well, it has to happen - The Last hurrah for the loaned solar scope, as it’s been returned😞 Very grateful to be trusted with it for nearly 6 months

Of course, seeing was dreadful, but I don’t think we can be too fussy when the sky is clear - so, this is 4 hours on Monday morning 8-12 condensed into 6 seconds

Interestingly, this final data was when I discovered AS!3 can do batches of stacks, rather than doing each one manually for 120 frames! Could have used that nugget a few months back! Process for this was:

Open all .ser file in AS!3, analyse, place grid and stack (25%)
Crop and sharpen in PixInsight
Alignment in imPPG
Black mask (needs tweaking, but good enough), False colour and denoise in PixInsight
Gif generated using PPIP

CEM60 / Tal100 PST mod, 2.5x powermate and Altair Hypercam 174mm. Captured with Sharpcap

Right, back to night-time adventures I go (till I can stump up for a Quark, of course 😇)

Edited September 5, 2020 by Yawning Angel

[JamesF]

That's very nice.  Well done

James

[MarkAR]

Excellent work. Time to save the pennies for your own solar set up.

[Altocumulus]

After that, the nights will be boring.....and cold

Good anim....

[skybadger]

7 hours ago, Yawning Angel said:

Interestingly, this final data was when I discovered AS!3 can do batches of stacks

Hi , I'm really interested in what you mean by this . Can you elaborate please ?

[Yawning Angel]

1 hour ago, skybadger said:

Can you elaborate please ?

Hiya, yes of course:

You can open multiple files in AS!3's Open dialogue....just mass select them (CTRL+A). If you then hit Analyse it'll run the first one, and you can set AP's. You seem to need to use the auto place option, so tweak the settings to get a good spread. Pick your output options and stacking % as normal then hit stack. Have a brew while it churns through all of the files automatically

You loose some control, but I wouldn't be placing AP's by hand on 120 stacks anyway!

After that, all the other processes can be batched too. Chuck has a great video which clued me in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXijbjkclMc

[Debo]

1 hour ago, Yawning Angel said:

You can open multiple files in AS!3's Open dialogue....just mass select them (CTRL+A). If you then hit Analyse it'll run the first one, and you can set AP's. You seem to need to use the auto place option, so tweak the settings to get a good spread. Pick your output options and stacking % as normal then hit stack. Have a brew while it churns through all of the files automatically

Many thanks, that's a brilliant tip and certainly saves loads of time 

[CraigT82]

1 hour ago, Yawning Angel said:

Hiya, yes of course:

You can open multiple files in AS!3's Open dialogue....just mass select them (CTRL+A). If you then hit Analyse it'll run the first one, and you can set AP's. You seem to need to use the auto place option, so tweak the settings to get a good spread. Pick your output options and stacking % as normal then hit stack. Have a brew while it churns through all of the files automatically

You loose some control, but I wouldn't be placing AP's by hand on 120 stacks anyway!

After that, all the other processes can be batched too. Chuck has a great video which clued me in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXijbjkclMc

The batch stacking is great! Also you don't actually need to do the analyse step first, if you're not bothered about viewing the quality graph you can just place the APs on the first preview image, then go straight to stack. This is what I do and I set it to stack 10%, 20%, 30% and 50%

[skybadger]

Thanks for this. I was aware of the ability to stack multiple files but never have understood how it could stack to the percentages for each file without setting a reference manually. I guess we are dependent on being confident as3 can select the reference as well or better than I can on a per-picture basis.