Flames ahoy!

 The last few days, I have tried a lot of techniques and processes for making timelapses of solar porminences. It has been a learning curve, but interesting. And I now feel I have it more or less under control. These are the two videos I made today. I found a large double prominence and filmed it for 3 hours. I am filming from my balcony, and when the sun is blocked by a support, I look at the whole sun, and I realized that there was a large area on the other side that had a lot of action. Unfortunately, clouds moved in, so I had to stop after about 1.5 hours. But it was definitely interesting.

I have used the same gear as before, but the processing is now AS!3 for stacking, then aligning ad cropping using imPPG before using PIPP for animation. This is smooth and works without a hitch.

Active prominence

 Another prominence. 4 hours of timelapse.

Tech det : Lunt LS35, ASI178MM gain 150, exp : 2.5ms. Stacked in AS!3, animated in PIPP.

Solar prominence animation, second attempt

 The first attempt was exciting, and inspiring. So I decided to make another go yesterday. But tracking was not good. I am not able to properly polar align my mount now during the summer, so the Sun drifted out of view of the camera in 10 minutes. More precisely, the cropped view. I only used 512x512 pixels of the cameras 3000x2000. Both in order to lower the storage demands, but also to speed up frames per second. 

The following is an interesting loop of plasma I discovered and started filming at the end of my session before I had to leave. Much to my joy and excitement, this loop was really moving. The frames were recorded 2 minutes apart. Which gives an impression of just how fast the plasma moves in this loop.

Tech details : Lunt LS35 Deluxe H-alpha telescope. ASI178MM gain 150, exp 2 ms. Stacked in AS!3, processed and animated in Gimp.

First attempt at protuberance animation

Today, on June 12th, there was a lot of activity on the Sun, and I found one "forest" that I decided to take multiple videos of. After processing each of the videos in AS!3, I had a list of 39 images. Then I loaded these images into GIMP as layers. After aligned them all, I created a GIF-animation from them. And the following is the result. The 39 images were captured in 1 h 40 min.

Tech details : Lunt LS35 Deluxe hydrogen alpha telescope, ASI178MM camera, no binning, 2.5 ms exposure, gain 150, stacked in AS!3, processed and animated in GIMP.