Canon 7D experiment 1 14 2012

[solarchat]

OK, so when I go to work air traffic I cant take a laptop and all that stuff with me. I have to go light. As you have seen of late I have been experimenting with different ways to use my DSLR to image the Sun.

Im pretty dang happy with this image. This is 60 frames from the Canon 7D stacked in Registax 6. I darkened it, cropped out and copied the surface and then repasted it onto the original brighter image that showed the prominences. Same image just recombined after tweaking. All the data was in the one image.

total time about 5 minutes from shooting to finished processing.

[earl]

thats pretty darn good. I like it.

[marktownley]

Top shot old bean

That's a stunning result for a DSLR.

[Montana]

Wow that is good for 5 minutes and to think I spend more than 20 minutes and your is better

Alexandra

[swisswalter]

Hi Stephen

a wonderful result :

[Bill E.]

B) maybe I will have to try imaging .You make it sound simple.

[solarchat]

Believe me when I say no one was more surprised than I was...

I used this setup:

a Canon 7D/2x teleconverter on a Lunt Double stacked 100mm scope on a Mach One GTO mount with a bass boat trolling motor battery...(my previous hobby).




I set the camera on full manual using faithful and monochrome image settings and the lowest jpg size possible...no raws.

The live view is almost impossible to focus so Iturned the exposure simulation up real high and zoomed in 10x to get a good edge focus. Then I reduced the ISO to 800 and the exposure to 180 sec. I used a Canon intervalometer set on one exposure every second and snapped 60 frames in color and in monochrome. The color ones were discarded because they were that awful pink color....

I had to reduce them all to 50% in order for Registax 6 to load all 60 frames. The I just stacked them and got a pretty bad looking image with some decent contrast. I opened it in Photoshop and made two versions of the image, one bright for proms (using levels) and one dark for surface details (using brightness and contrast only).

i copied the dark disk onto the bright proms, enlarged it a little to cover the overexposed limb and applied "Ramsden Orange" curves to it.

Here is a few mnore versions of it:
This is the darkened disk:



This is the composite cropped and tweaked just a bit to remove the noise some.:




Here is an M42 taken later with just the Canon 7D and a Sigma 500mm lens
single 3 minute image showing street light glare from the parking lot:





15 of the above images stacked in Registax and tweaked to remove the yellow glare a little...





I cant tell you what a stress reliever it is to be able to go outside and take pictures of the sky after avoiding mid air collisions all night in the busiest airspace in the world.

Im not giving up my PGR's and DMK's yet Chris, but I do enjoy trying something new. I believed that it was impossible to get decent images of narrowband with a DSLR up until now. Im not breaking any image records here but it is fantastic compared to the generally horrible DSLR images I have tried before....

Gonna try it again today to see if I can do any better...thanks for looking..

[vidman]

Hey man, these are awesome. You did what I hoped to try with Solar when I got my LS80. Now I can pick your brain (as usual) for all the difficulties.

I need to add a 1.25 adaptor to my t-mount. Currently I have only 2". What do you suggest and where to buy? Maybe your buddy at Camera Bug?

Last nite we did our M42 thing also. But it was like 9 degrees when we gave up (how can you call that sissy stuff...hahahaha). Today the sun is in a cloudless sky BUT the windchill is -6 to 6 degrees. I think i will just let the sun heat the house thru the windows and await another day.

Keep our skies safe buddy.



Not completed. Awaiting Robin's PS touch.

[Montana]

Wow that is good!

Alexandra