From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: November 3, 2008 8:03:34 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Cc: macastronomer@yahoogroups.com

Subject: sunday's sun

Hi all,

Here is an image I made yesterday of the sun in Ha:

http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/sun_110208.html

The data was captured in Astro IIDC 4.0 and processed in 4.01 Alpha 8. I used 36 multiple alignment points to improve the sharpness around the disk of the sun (seeing was highly turbulent as the sun, now at 32 degrees altitude, passes just a bit above the rooftops with their winter heating season distortion). I used the batch processing feature to prepare the 36 MAP images. Final assembly of the pieces into a single image was done manually in Photoshop.

This is a tough project for software to handle due to the high degree of morphing from frame to frame in daytime seeing. I was surprised to get such a good result with automated processing.

Settings: Lunar/Solar for alignment, manual selection, gaussian blur applied for sharpness and alignment, center quadrant was used for sharpness evaluation, CI cutoff was 70% - final selection was 90 frames. Pixel matching tolerance was set to medium low. Frames stacked for each MAP image was in the range of 64-85, with 85 frames successfully stacked in all but 4 of the images.

best wishes,

Alan