Prom: ASI174MM, prom quark & SW Evostar 80

[nicspenceryork]

Hi all,
My York sky is as cloudy as traditional lemonade today so I've returned to a battle with colour processing!
Some of you are asking about which scope to use with a quark so I thought I'd share what I get. Took this last week.
Skywatcher Evostar 80ed ds pro, Daystar Quark Prominence, Baader UV-IR filter, ASI174MM, Celestron AVX, Daystar Flatcap, ZWO tilt adapter. The home of this equipment is a hatch roof observatory which has been a game changer: no more struggling with quick set ups and now have the luxury of a polar aligned scope. Like Terry has already suggested, before spending much more on equipment, an observatory (mini yet very functional in may case) is a very worthwhile investment.
10% of 45s processed on a MacBook Air: stacked in AS2, processed in IMPGG, tweaked and coloured in GIMP and gently polished in Mac Photos App.

NS 20220602 0937 sun ha promn NW by Nic Spencer, on Flickr

[Dennis]

Very nice processing

[Rusted]

Wonderful image!

It is just like being there.

[arnedanielsen]

Beautiful work!

Having everything setup and ready to image makes life so much simpler!

Best regards,
Arne

[ChrisHalpha2017]

beautifull!!!!!

[rsfoto]

Great image

[DeepSolar64]

That's beautiful Nic! Sharp details and excellent coloring. I use GIMP and have never gotten mine to color that well on inverted images.

James

[pedro]

Beautiful image Nic. I would like to learn more on your false colour methods

[MAURITS]

Lovely image Nic.

[ffellah]

Fantastic image, Nic. Beautiful resolution of the prom and spicules, lovely coloring, the works !

Franco

[MapleRidge]

Superb pic Nic

Brian

[rigel123]

Excellent job Nic, lovely processing!

[marktownley]

Excellent result there Nic, nicely done

[Carbon60]

Beautiful image, Nic. This colour combination style is one of my favourites.

Stu.

[nicspenceryork]

I have to pinch myself to believe your kind feedback thanks: to me, it's a bit like Freddie Mercury telling me I'm a good singer!
I notice that the flat I take with the Daystar Flatcap improves all my images. After stacking, I use the 'double inversion' approach in ImPGG learned from a YouTube video by Simon Tang. I then open that image in GIMP and duplicate it. I work on the disc with high pass, emboss & colour and the proms with sharpen & colour. I then cut the orange disc with a feathered edge and paste it on the blue sky prom image. I change the transparency of the orange disc so I can see the surface details in both images until the disc and prom images are precisely in line. Then I merge the layers at 93% transparency as 100% is far too harsh. Then I tweak the definition and colour in Mac Photos app. I know I can improve the appearance of the curvature of the disc next time by using Impgg to produce a disc and then use Impgg separately to produce the proms, but importantly, using the same stack. I will knock the blue down a tad as well I think. The inspiration for the blue sky came from Alan Friedman and the orange is based on Mark Townley's although I needed to soften the original as it looked too intense against the blue. Before now, I just kept getting a yellowy disc and a blackish sky every time... a bit too harsh a licorice allsort for my eye... and now I'm further on with mono images I decided to revisit it!
Happy to help with any more detail on the various stages... I've been stuck in this zone for 2 years and it's not much fun!
See you later,
Nic

[GreatAttractor]

That's a great image.

In the not-too-distant future you should be able to use a Mac-native version of ImPPG, thanks to a contributor who's working on ironing out some compilation kinks.

[torsinadoc]

Excellent image!

[SolarHans]

Thanks for sharing the details, beautifull colors!

[eroel]

Nic:
Beautiful clean and crisp colored image, thanks for sharing your work and experiences in colouring.
Best wishes.
Eric.

[pedro]

Found the Simon Tang Youtube Video



Tutorial - How to Capture & Process Solar Images - Autostakkert IMPPG

[nicspenceryork]

Fantastic! I’ll be honest, I thought you were all joking in the zoom meeting about doing a video. But now I think perhaps you were serious! If you don’t get the answers you’re looking for I’ll do a video if I can work out how. I’ll have to dust off my old teaching skills!
Nic

[vineyard]

That's excellent. The prom is exquisite - both in its colouring (love the contrasting colour) and in the delicacy of its individual tendrils. Almost ghostly.

And this is a great thread too for the other tidbits in there - thanks for the video & detailing your workflow. And oh happy day to read GreatAttractor's post that a native Mac version of ImPPG is on its way...now if only AutoStakkert could also have a native Mac version & I could ditch my virtual Windows machine.

Thanks again.

[nicspenceryork]

That's a great image.

In the not-too-distant future you should be able to use a Mac-native version of ImPPG, thanks to a contributor who's working on ironing out some compilation kinks.

That’s brilliant news Filip!
Thanks for letting us know,
Nic

[DeepSolar64]

Fantastic! I’ll be honest, I thought you were all joking in the zoom meeting about doing a video. But now I think perhaps you were serious! If you don’t get the answers you’re looking for I’ll do a video if I can work out how. I’ll have to dust off my old teaching skills!
Nic

Nope. No joke. Serious as a heart attack! Your image is beautiful!!

[nicspenceryork]

That's excellent. The prom is exquisite - both in its colouring (love the contrasting colour) and in the delicacy of its individual tendrils. Almost ghostly.

And this is a great thread too for the other tidbits in there - thanks for the video & detailing your workflow. And oh happy day to read GreatAttractor's post that a native Mac version of ImPPG is on its way...now if only AutoStakkert could also have a native Mac version & I could ditch my virtual Windows machine.

Thanks again.

Thank you, you’re very kind… yes a Mac version of Autostakkert would be wonderful. I’m also frustrated to be restricted to using the older AS2 through wine as I could never quite master lynkeos!
Nic

[nicspenceryork]

Okay, watch this space then, I’ll do a short video specifically on the colour composite part of the processing in the next couple of days! ☀️🟠🔵
Nic

[Montana]

This really is a fab image Nic

I did a blue sky once in the past but I have absolutely no idea how I did it I look forward to the tutorial

Alexandra

[nicspenceryork]

For your amusement, my first ever YouTube video showing how I did the composite colour image.
Beginners, it's a great base to work from.
Experts, you'll cringe with where I go wrong but do tell me so I can improve!!
Enjoy,
Nic

[marios i.]

Geia sou Nic,
you caught the texture very nicely. Incredible combination of colors. Excellent Work!

I will buy a camera!

[JochenM]

Very nice, Nic.

[daniele_bonfiglio]

Dear Nic,
thank you very much for the nice picture and for the tutorial!
Let me share my experience with dealing with two colours. In the attached screenshot you see a Photoshop window, where I make an orange disc (including orange proms) on top of a light blue sky background.
Basically I duplicate the image (already modified with ImPPG) and use one layer as the background by Gaussian blurring the disc, putting a layer mask in correspondence to the limb, and using the "screen" blending mode. The other layer is a standard false colored Sun with black background.
I'm pretty sure the same result could be obtained with GIMP as well.
Best, Daniele

ScreenHunter 361.png (2.12 MiB) Viewed 569 times

[torsinadoc]

Nice tutorial! Thanks for sharing

[Montana]

Nic, can you put this in a separate topic then I will put in the library

Alexandra

[nicspenceryork]

Nic, can you put this in a separate topic then I will put in the library :)

Alexandra

Done!
Thank you,
Nic

[tbob]

Hello, I am new to this and was searching the site for tutorials. It looks as though the video from Nic has disappeared from the thread. Is it still available somewhere?

Thanks,
Bob T.

[Montana]

The link to this is also in the Solar Reference Library where there are lots of tutorials available viewtopic.php?t=36650
However, it looks like Nic has removed the video from YouTube

Alexandra

[nicspenceryork]

So sorry for the inconvenience of removing the video Bob. For some reason I couldn’t find this original post on solarchat either so was unable to delete it, hence this situation, sorry!
When I finally got my head around processing and equipment I realised that the video was misleading in parts, and in addition to being cringeworthy and too long, I decided the best thing for it was the bin! A good chunk of my learning was based on these two YouTube videos, trial and error and 100% determination! Now I’ve learned to process I use the tricks learned to present the more natural, positive (non inverted sun) which is very much more my preference.
Do get in touch if I can help with anything after you have seen the videos.
Good luck with it,
Nic

https://youtu.be/-zD4EIGBess?feature=shared

https://youtu.be/G-41RMTCdTE?feature=shared