From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>
Date: August 11, 2008 1:33:01 PM MDT
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: solar image from Saturday
Hi all,
I wanted to share this prominence image captured on Saturday:
http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/towering_inferno.html
I have in the past had a hard time getting my images to stack reliably in AstroIIDC due to the high degree of deformations found frame to frame in daytime seeing. I started working on this picture by hand selecting frames in another program. I was limited to working on a sub section of the frame (DMK 41AF02 - 1280x960 pixel array) - a workaround required in the other software. After several hours of bleary work looking through a few thousand frames I ran a test in AstroIIDC (version 4.00.03) and was happy to discover that it selected, aligned and stacked the frames with very high accuracy. I used a low pixel matching tolerance which helped. The processed results (also done in AstroIIDC) were actually a hair better than my hand wrought efforts and accomplished in a tiny fraction of the time. Time is important in solar imaging... a day old picture of the sun is really yesterday's news! Post processing done in Photoshop CS3.
Hope everyone is finding some sun breaks this summer,
best regards,
Alan
Alan Friedman