13/07/17 AR2665 & AR2666

12/07/17 AR2665 getting even better.

Missed a few days due to the weather but AR2665 has increased in size.

AR2665 and prom. between clouds 09/07/17

I managed to capture these while dodging clouds.

Sun 08/07/17 Nice prominence and active region

Both a nice prominence and active region on view.
Images taken with a Lunt LS50THa, ASI120MM and the lens from a SW 2x barlow on the camera nose piece, giving an effective focal length of about 600mm.

For the prominence picture I captured 3000 frames and stacked the best 200.

Yet again ICE and AutoStitch failed to merge the mosaic so 2x3 mosaic created manually with iMerge and coloured in Photoshop.

Mosaic 2x3 from 05/07/17

As neither automatic stitching applications I tried worked (ICE and AutoStitch), I went back to a manual application that I used years ago (iMerge). Though it takes a little more work at least the results are reasonably good.

First experiments with mosaic images 20/06/17

These were all produced using a Barlow element on the camera nose piece a ROI of 960x960 and cling film flats applied during capture. A ROI was used so that a full flat could be obtained from the centre of the disk before capturing the main images. Four sub-frames captured and merged in ICE. Then different processing applied for effects.

Sun Ha 20/06/17 Flats experiment

I thought I'd experiment with flats. Used cling film over the objective to get flats both full disk and close up, with mixed results. Captured 1000 frames and stacked 500 for each. The images below have just been stacked in AS! and sharpened with Registax wavelets, no other processing.
The full disk images where at prime focus and closeups added a Barlow lens to the camera nose piece.

Full disk with flats

Full disk without flats

Closeup with flats

Closeup without flats

Closeup disk edge with flats

Closeup disk edge without flats

All the flats where applied during processing with AS!3.

The full disk with flats could be improved with more processing, however the NR looks far worse with flats!

The close up on the disk does improve with flats, however the close up at the solar edge has worse NR with flats.

I know all the images could be improved with more processing, however I wanted to compare just the effects of flats, as you can see the results are mixed. More experiments are called for I think.

First light with the Lunt LS50THa from 10/06/17

First light image, Lunt LS50THa and ASI120MM at prime focus.