Well I never knew I could do that! - Venus Transit from Aust

CCD vs Film? Lots of time vs no patience? Alright, this is your place to discuss all the astrophotography what's and what's not. You can discuss about techniques, accessories, cameras, whatever....just make sure you also post some nice photos here too!
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Barry
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Well I never knew I could do that! - Venus Transit from Aust

Post by Barry »

Usually when I take a photo of the sun through my Baader film and ED120 or ED80, I get something like picture number one.

Tonight, after all kinds of problems getting four different stacking programs to play the game, I ended up stacking eight of these frames and produced image number two.

Unfortunately there isn't enough memory on my laptop for these programs to process RAW or TIFF in any great number, if at all, so I had to convert to JPEG (crappy alternative) and go with that.

Still, I'm surprised and amazed at the result. Even though I lost a little of the outer limb of the sun, I can see the surface granulation that I have never seen before, as well as much clearer and sharper sunspots.

I'm going to clean all my glass surfaces and start practising for the eclipse coming up in November. Hopefully I should be full-bottle on solar imaging by then.

1. Image

2. Image
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cataclysm
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Re: Well I never knew I could do that! - Venus Transit from

Post by cataclysm »

Nice work! Thanks for sharing. :P
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Gary
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Re: Well I never knew I could do that! - Venus Transit from

Post by Gary »

Beautiful! The joys of experimentation!
http://www.astro.sg
email: gary[at]astro.sg
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"The importance of a telescope is not how big it is, how well made it is.
It is how many people, less fortunate than you, got to look through it."
-- John Dobson.
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kohjb
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Re: Well I never knew I could do that! - Venus Transit from

Post by kohjb »

Hi Barry,

That's really an interesting picture. It looks almost like the H-alpha views! Several thoughts come to mind:

1) Can you share how you stacked the images? What software, process steps did you use?
2) Is there a possibility that the apparent "loss" of limb definition is "real" ? In most Ha images, there is limb darkening so is that what is reflected in your image?
3) Have you compared your image with one taken in Ha or CaK to see if the granulation is real or could it be an artefact of processing?

All in all, a very exciting post giving hope for "regular" solar imagers, and thanks so much for sharing!

Best regards!
Joo Beng.
Celestron 9.25SGT, Meade ETX125, Orion ED80
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Barry
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Re: Well I never knew I could do that! - Venus Transit from

Post by Barry »

I have been having problems with my computer running out of memory for stacking, so I turned them into JPEGS before stacking them in Maxim DL Essentials. I then exported it to Photoshop elements for some tweaking.

Tonight, I sent all my RAW files to a friend with a more powerful computer. He stacked them for me and sent the stacked TIFF back to me. I then loaded it into Photoshop elements 6 once again, and had a play around.

This is the result.

Image
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Clifford60
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Re: Well I never knew I could do that! - Venus Transit from

Post by Clifford60 »

Great result, thank you for sharing
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