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8/06/2013. A month! It has been a month since I have written anything here. Well, it's been that kind of month. Put a house on the market, got a lowball offer, negotiated it up, settled the deal, put the money in the bank, and we're about to use it to clear some debt and refinance a mortgage. Among other things. I finally got up to speed (enough) with WordPress to use it professionally. And this and that.
August 4, 2013. One of many Active Regions
"View Image" for a substantiallylarger presentation.
Nine panels, each the best 100 of 400-600 frames.
ZWO Optical ASI120MM, Teleskop-Services Tilt Adjuster
Orion barlow (on snout for maximum EFL)
FireCapture 2.2. Exp: 20ms / 16-bit captures / Gain 18
Flatfielded using a defocused image of a relatively featureless area of the Sun
(100 frames)
Stacked in AVIStack 2, assembled in Photoshop,
heavy lifting in PixInsight (deconvolution and histogram mods, mostly)
Still haven't had a chance to actually get busy with Ken Crawford's solar imaging tutorials. I'm mentioning them again so I won't forget about them.
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Except where noted, solar photos are made with a ZWO Optical ASI120MM camera (ca. June 2013) behind a Lunt Solar Systems 60mm THa with its objective replaced by an Orion 90mm F10 achromat. The telescope uses a B600 blocking filter and is mounted piggyback with an Astro-Tech 10-inch Ritchey-Chretien (carefully capped!) on an Astro-Physics Mach1GTO mount. A Dell Latitude notebook running FireCapture provides camera control and capture services via USB 2.0. Images typically begin as 400 - 1200 frame AVI's captured at about 27 fps. Clips are aligned and stacked using AVIStack 2.0. The resulting files are processed via wavelet functions in Registax and / or the FocusMagic 3.0.2 deconvolution plug-in in Photoshop CS4. Alternatively, PixInsight picks up the processing somewhere in the workflow after AVIStack processing. The imaging train usually includes an Orion "Shorty" 2x barlow screwed into the ASI120MM body. A RoboFocus motor with a timing belt looped around the stock (or, sometimes, a Feathertouch) focus knob enables remote operation. |