AR 1785 - 9 July 2013

AR 1785 today.. the sky is all grey here and the seeing is also not very good. With my 8 bit camera it is very hard to not to overexpose the plage regions while keeping the surface bright enough to see the details. Hence i have 'burnt' some pixels here.. DMK21 is a good camera but i am looking for a better one these days.. something like LSI.

AR 1785 on 8 July 2013

This is how it has been changed in about 24 hours.  I tried not to 'burn' bright pixels by keeping the exposure a bit down but i do like to make the 'Plage' a bit brighter, more on the bluish side.

Solar Disk with AR 1785

okay so here is the whole disk of the sun.. as usual, four mosaic with different processed flavor.

AR 1785, Active Sunspot Region

According to spaceweather.com, in less than 24 hours this sunspot region has stretched by more than 40,000 km. I cannot image sunspots these days but i can use h-alpha telescope to see the region.. here it is in color.. look how strong the bright plage features are, a sure sign of strong magnetic activity.

Following is the picture taken from Damien Peach yesterday. This image was taken with the visible light and 356mm telescope. Same area on the sun, but in two different lights.

Copernicus crater and splash effects

This is an old file, which i found yesterday in my old external hard drive. I think i used DBK31 color camera for this one. This file has more than 18,000 images and has a size of 45 GB!

Back then, i processed it with Registax only which i had put on my older website. I am not sure if i was able to put it back on this new one. 

Last night i re-processed it with AVIstack (i love this program!) and registax and photoshop.. here is the result. Copernicus crater (the central white rings) happened when a huge piece of rock slammed the surface of the moon and made a big crater at the spot. It is more than 90 km in size and just look how far the splash effect went out around it.. beautiful.

No solar imaging today either

okay.. so this is the picture of the Sun.. but not the one i would ever enjoy to take. I waited for about 2 hours to see if the clouds move away but they did not. Not happy at all. 

No Solar Imaging today

Hi everyone.. i have been imaging the Sun daily for a few days now but today thin clouds were ruining the sky and they held me back from reaching to the Sun and grounded me for today. Sorry, no solar proms from my telescope today :( 

Tomorrow i should try to get as many as possible with my 'humble' 60 mm scope and DMK21 camera.  

 

Full Solar Disk - 4 July 2013

When i upload the images of the prominence, i start to get the requests for the picture of the whole disk of the Sun. With 'Imaging Source DMK21 camera, i have a comparatively small CCD chip. This works well because i can get to 60 fps with totally uncompressed raw images. The trade-off is that i can image a very small portion of the sky.

To image the whole disk of the Sun, today i removed the 2.5X barlow (which obviously zooms the view 2.5 times) between the camera and the 60 mm telescope.. this still does not give me the whole disk of the sun.  So to capture the whole disk, i must record 4 different AVI of each quadrant of the Sun.

I went upto 10,000 images in less than 3 minutes and used a 1,000 to stack and process with my usual routine.  Photoshop was not behaving with its Automate-Photomerge feature so i had to stitch each image manually.. its really hard to manage the brightness/contrast this way.

Here are the final images.. Which is the best one for you?

More from 3 July 2013

I tried a little different approach here. These are pseudo colors of course but i first inverted the B/W image and then colored it like this.. also made the sky black which was all white when i inverted the image.

Latest upgrade.. Thunderbolt Drive!

My latest toy! I use Macbook Pro for all my computing need.. Apple introduced Thunderbolt Port with the capability of.. well.. lighting speed of data transfer. I always wanted to have a Thunderbolt external drive and now, I have one. LaCie d2 USB3 & Thunderbolt 3 TB Drive.

 

With the raw uncompressed AVI files i shoot for Sun, Moon and planets, my laptop's hard disk always complain of low storage. Though i have 750 GB HD, it still way too low to save those massive AVI files. 

To give you an idea, today's 1 minute and 50 seconds AVI file had a size of 2 GB! Now this is for the Sun where i had to keep the acquisition time very small so the ever changing Sun's surface does not get blurred. But when i shoot the moon, i can go upto many many minutes of recording and the single file can be of 40-50 GB in size.. yes you read that right.. no type here.

Now imagine transferring all this data to the external drives.. i had to leave the computer on for over the night transfers.

Enter the world of Thunderbolt technology: My laptop has 12 GB RAM and the built-in hard disk has 5400 rpm. Following is the test result of the built in Macbook Pro (4 cores 2.4 Ghz i7 processor) hard disk.

 

Write and read speed is around 50 MB/s and 60 MB/s. Now see how thunderbolt external drive is doing in this test.

Look at those speeds.. a whopping 166.5 MB/s write and 169.7 MB/s read speed.. WOW! 

This is great.. just great!!

 

Nice prominence on 1st July 2013

I am not very happy with the processing of this image since i lost some very dim details in the prominence while coloring it in photoshop.. but this is the best i could do with it so far. This is a combined image of two separate high and low exposures of the same area of the Sun and this way i was able to capture both the very faint prominence and the bright solar disk.

I like the B/W image much more than the colored image here. What i have found, during my astronomical imaging routines is that every image is different in terms of processing. I really feel the need to make AVI with at least three exposure/gain/brightness etc settings to do the justice for bringing out details. I would try to do that tomorrow morning. The only thing that worries me is the extreme heat i face everyday while capturing these files. I miss my observatory!

This was the best prominence today on the Sun. The fast movement of matter in some parts can be noticed because of a blurry effect. I could have made a nice animation out of it but that needs a precise polar alignment which i have not yet done with this new mount so until then, enjoy the still images.

More from 28 June 2013

This seems interesting..