Bubbly surface

 Yesterday and today, I did some timelapses of the surface of the Sun. I just love my 5 inch telescope. Showing so much detail of what is happening on the surface. 

The first is a prominence that I thought would amont to something, but didn't. It was flapping a bit, but nothing big. Today, after work, I managed to take a short timelapse before the Sun dropped too low. And I got to see a little spurting on the surface an the edge.

The data is the same for both except the gain is 275 and exposure 6 ms for the prominence, and 175 and 5ms for the surface video.

Solar blast!

 Today, I was lucky enough to catch a big blast from one of the sunspots that have travelled all the way to the other edge of the Sun. I made 1 video per minute for 2 hours. The blast came in the middle of my timelapse. And the following is the result. Click on the animation for a bigger version. Enjoy!

Tech details : 5" homemade h-alpha telescope, ASI174MM camera gain 175, 5ms exposure, 16 bit resolution. Stacked in Autostakkert, sharpened and aligned in imPPG, animated in PIPP.

Solar activity

 The solar activity is definitely picking up. The past few days has been clear, so I have been able to make some timelapses of a group of sunspots. The first day wasn't very active, but today, there was a lot more flares and prominences flashing. I also made a mosaic of the whole surface of the Sun. This was made up of 9 images. Click on the animation or the image to see full size.

Tech details timelapse: 5" homemade H-alpha telescope, ASI174MM camera, gain 175, 5ms, 8bit. 1000 frames per video, 1 video per minute for 180 minutes (3 hours). Stacked in Autostakkert (best 25% used), sharpened and aligned in imPPG and animated in PIPP.

Tech details full image : same equipment, but gain 215, 3ms exp, 16bit. 1000 frames (best 25% used). Stitched in Image Composer Editor (Microsoft). 

The Mars occultation on December the 8th

I got up at 5 in the morning to get ready. I had put out the telescope the previous evening so it would be acclimatized in the morning. I connected the camera to the PC and fired up FireCapture. I pointed the telescope to the Moon and focused as well as I could. I was ready, And I had half an hour to spare.

I had set up autoguiding which was working fine. I did take a full frame image of the Moon and Mars. Just as a start. I was ready.

There were some thin clouds in the view. But nothing that hindered the view.

As Mars was closing in, I changed the ROI to 400x300 pixels. And I planned to take a timelapse. I was ready a couple of minutes before Mars would disappear behind the Moon. And then things started going south. First, a thicker cloud moved past, causing autoguiding to fail due to the lower brightness, And Mars moved almost out of the view. I turned off autoguiding and moved the planet back into view. And increased the gain to compensate. I could now see the Moon's limb in the view already. My pulse increased as I now realized I had to speed things up. I set up a timelapse run. Continuous 100 frame videos of the scene. After the first video had been shot, a message popped up. "Do you want to overwrite the file?" Wait? WHAT? I pressed No. The message popped up again. The Moons limb was closing in. I went back to the main view to do things manually. But the record button was gone. It took precious few seconds before I realized that by NOT closing the autorun window, the record button would be gone. I closed it, and pressed "Record". Only to realize that Mars had slipped halfway out of view. I moved it back into view. My heartrate and blood pressure were now in the 200 range. I tried taking a number of files in a row just as I planned with Autorun, but the same message popped up. I realised the problem. File naming in FireCapture didn't allow several files to be written too close in time. So I had to wait a second or two between takes. I gave up the timelapse idea, and just settled for getting ANYTHING. And I did. After some processing, I did get a few decent shots of the occultation. And here they are. My heartrate and bloodpressure is now back to normal. I have learned some hard lessons about preparations. I thought I was prepared, and then this "feature" of FireCapture reared its ugly head, and my prep and planning failed. 

Tech details : 200mm Klevstov Cass at F/10. ASI178MC camera, gain 300, exposure 5mS. 100 frames per video. Stacked in AS!3 (100%), sharpened and RGB-aligned in Registax. Final touch-up in Irfanview.

Best resolution with new camera

The skies cleared for a short while on saturday evening, so I took the opportunity to do some timelapse filming. Unfortunately, as per usual, some clouds/fog ran in front of the planet. So the guiding failed, and Jupiter slipped out of view. But I did get about 1.5 hours worth of videos. I did the usual processing. But this time I also added another step. I found out that Gimp actually has a batch-mode! So I could do some sharpening there, and when I knew how to sharpen a single image, I just went ahead and did it with all of them. There is still some noise in the images, so I need to figure out how to make them less so. But I am getting there...

Tech det : 200mm Klevtsov-Cass w/2.5x Powermate, recorded with SharpCap. ASI678MC binning 2, gain 300 6.25mS exposures. 20 seconds of exposures with 40 seconds intervals. Stacked in AS!3, wavelets/whitebalance in Registax, extra sharpening in Gimp and animation in PIPP.

Jupiter October 11th

 Yesterday night was clear'ish. At least for most of the night. I started recording 4 hours of videos from around 11.30PM and went to bed. In the morning, I closed down shop and went to work. This evening, much to my disappointment, I found that most of the night was miss, since obviously a could had moved in front of Jupiter, making the autoguiding fail. And thus I only got 47 videos in total. But I DID get the Giant Red Spot! I loved it. So here is the short animation. This was also with a new camera, and without the Powermate I had used previously. There was a lot of turbulence, so the images didn't come out superclear, but I am happy with the result. Looking forward to the next really clear and steady night.

Tech det: Tal200 Klevtsov-Cass & F/10, ASI678MC camera, gain 200 exp 5mS. Stacked in AS!3, wavelets in Registax, animation in PIPP.

Jupiter 20 sept 2022

 I wanted to try higher sampling to see if the quality could be made better. So I pulled out my 4x Powermate. With 2x binning I was hoping to max out the resolution of my 200mm Klevtsov-Cass. I set Firecapture to record 240 videos of 1000 images over 4 hours. But, of course, after months of nothing, Windows decided this was a great night to update. So while I was sound asleep, and only about 90 minutes after I started the timelapse, Windows restarted and the rest of the night was a waste. But at least I got 82 images after processing. And I did get better resolution. Or at least, it seems so. I am still not pleased with my processing skills, but I am hoping that it will improve as time goes by. The moon Ganymede popped up casting it's shadow at the end of the timelapse. An extra bonus.

Tech details : Tal 200K telescope with 4x TeleVue Powermate, ASI178MC camera, gain 250, 16mS exposure. Processed in AS!3 (10% best images used), sharpened and WB fixed in Registax. Animated in PIPP.