SolarChat!

Hello all: yesterday morning was sunny with temperatures in the low 30's. The sky was totally clear but the jetstream was unfriendly, with strong high altitude winds: I was right in the middle of it and seeing was definitely affected. This is the other large but fainter prom (not Pedro's beautiful SPOD) that was showing yesterday. 76 minutes of activity condensed in about 7.5 seconds of animation. I added few stills showing some of the plasma action flowing up.
This is the first time I used the ZWO174 for prom animations in conjunction with a 1.6x Astro Engineering Barlow that Alexandra very kindly found for me in the UK at a terrific deal. So thank you Alexandra ! The resolution is lower than the Flea 3 3.2MP but the chip is more sensitive.

Clear skies to all.
Franco

Hi Franco,

Great images and as well the animation. Maybe color the Sun disk black so the prominces stand out easier ?

Here https://www.netweather.tv/charts-and-da ... ,47.39,712 is another Jetstream page.

Rainer

Cool animation Franco!

Very best,

Hi Franco...

The proms images and animation look great

Glad to see you get some sun!!!

Brian

Franco:
A very nice session, beautiful prominences.
Best wishes,
Eric.

Good looking prominence shots (and animation) there Franco.

Nice looking setup as well.

Wow!! this is the best animation you have done so far Franco, and wonderful activity too what I would do however is just crop the whole series when you have it in the stack so that you are just showing the main prom and the secondary prom. This way the whole animation will be zoomed in a bit (less white and black space). You can use the crop tool to crop the whole of the animation series in one go, then re-save for web and devices.

Alexandra

Excellent results Franco! I use the AE1.6x with my 174 camera and SM90, it's a good combination.

Thank you all for your very nice comments. Rainer: this is only my fourth animation and I am currently trying to improve my craft. When I get the image scale right with right camera, barlows and post processing, I will focus on improving other aspects of it. Alexandra: thank you for your good advice. This is already a cropped image. The entire frame is much larger. Due to the bad seeing affecting the result, if I crop much more, the quality of the remaining image deteriorates to the point of being very fuzzy and no longer enjoyable.

Franco

Alexandra: I cropped the animation as you suggested. Now 488 pixels wide. Let me know what you think.

Franco

Franco. that is a nice smooth animation. My autoguider arrived yesterday, so now I'm waiting for the clouds to clear so I can do some animations.
Can you tell me what your exposure intervals are and how many frames per capture?.

Martin

Lovely animation, Franco. It does look better cropped. Nice and fluid, beautifully illustrating solar dynamics in action.

Stu.

Cropped does draw the eye in very fine work indeed I love the plasma splash half way through

Alexandra

Thank you Martin and Stu for your comments. Thank you as always Alexandra for your guidance. Martin: the range of frames is typically 300 to 500 at somewhere between 30 seconds to a minute intervals. I guess it all depends on how smooth you want your animation to be. Less time between captures means a smoother animation but more data to deal with. I use 400 to 500 frames at one minute intervals. Here is a not very good screen shot while doing this animation in Firecapture using the Autorun feature. You set the number of captures, number of frames per capture and intervals, start it and all you have to do is keep the prominence in the center of the reticle as accurately as you can. Before you start, make sure you have enough storage in your PC, as some of these animations can create more than 100GB of data, depending on the camera resolution and length of the animation. This particular animation was about 80GB of data.

Hope this helps.

Franco

Very good animation, Franco, nice and smooth. The cropped version shows the action well. Thanks for putting in the time and effort. I still balk at mosaics.

Phil

Nice animation Franco, very nice color on the images.

Thank you Phil and Maurits. I always admire the images you both post. Phil: the SPOD filaprom is a killer image . Now that the sun is pretty blank I think prom animations are a way to keep busy: it is few hours of work but I enjoy each project. The result, I think, is worth it.

Franco

Hi Franco, very nice images and animation!

Thank you Salvo

Franco

Thank you for your advice Franco, I tried my first animation session today and achieved reasonable results. What frame rate delay do you use for playback? Iv'e been working on around .3 to .5 seconds .

Martin

Hi Martin: if you run it with zero seconds delay on each frame I believe the animation runs at 10 frames per second. That means 30 minutes of activity with one minute captures (30 frames stacked) runs in about 3 seconds and so on. 60 minutes runs in 6 seconds. Obviously you can change the delay depending on what you need for smoothness of the animation. I think you are on the right track with what you are trying now: I think each animation may call for its own rate, but the ones I did so far run with zero seconds delay or 0.125 seconds.

Alexandra, Mark T, Stu and Pedro are much better than I am at doing this and I am trying to learn from them. Alexandra has her Solar Nutcase reference guide that has been very helpful for me.

Franco

Thanks Franco, I have just finished reading Alexandra's excellent solar imaging tutorial, it has lots of good information.

Martin