10 replies to this topic

[jaimie_h]

Today was my 4th or 5th day out with my new 100 mm Lunt DS. I've been doing mainly visual observing, and spent almost an hour with this incredible prominence. The seeing seemed pretty good, and the photo doesn't fully capture the glory of it in the eyepiece. This is my second astrophotography attempt with my ZWO ASI462MM. Acquired and stacked with ASI software on Mac OS, blended layers in photoshop to capture both the surface and the prominence.

 

Jaimie

 

 

[groom]

Nice image, Jaimie!

[rigel123]

Nice shot!

[hornjs]

Nice shot!  One the favorite parts of my session is in Ha to drive around the limb and get surprised by nice looking proms.  

[rajilina]

Today was my 4th or 5th day out with my new 100 mm Lunt DS. I've been doing mainly visual observing, and spent almost an hour with this incredible prominence. The seeing seemed pretty good, and the photo doesn't fully capture the glory of it in the eyepiece. This is my second astrophotography attempt with my ZWO ASI462MM. Acquired and stacked with ASI software on Mac OS, blended layers in photoshop to capture both the surface and the prominence.

 

Jaimie

 

  good_prom.jpg

Would you mind sharing your exact equipment setup and process? I’ve just got a Lunt 100mm (single stacked for now, the double stack module is on order) and I’m also using Mac OS. There’s so little info out there for how to do these things on a Mac, first of all. What blocking filter do you have? I’m new to astrophotography in general but have so far figured out how to get my camera, my ASiair, and my mount to communicate and track in the paltry hour of sunlight I had today; I can see the sun in the ASiair software and capture video but it’s not close to being right (very overexposed), and I’m not sure what settings to use in ASiair to get a picture that looks more like yours. Are you using ASi Studio or just the ASiair software? 

[Foc]

Well blended and I am envious of your image of those proms. 

[jaimie_h]

Thanks for all the encouraging words! I primarily got the scope for visual observing, but I'm dipping my toe into photography after many years as a night-time "faint fuzzy" hunter. Solar is a whole new and exciting world.

 

@rajilina, my method for getting that image was pretty ad hoc, compared to the sophisticated methods I've seen experienced folks on Cloudy Nights use (mostly on PC unfortunately). But I wanted something "quick and dirty" without having to 1) spend hours tweaking and 2) buy a PC. I rough polar-aligned my AM5 mount with the wonderful PS Align Pro software on my phone, and used SkyAtlas to start tracking at solar rate and slewed to the sun (which is obviously in the database). I have a B1800 blocking filter on a diagonal (got this one as it seemed the most versatile to do both imaging and visual). I used ASICap to collect several 2000-image runs at different exposures - as I recall the surface image used a 1 msec acquisition, and I played with the gain to make it look the way I wanted it while watching the real-time image. For the prom, I took some higher-gain exposures (maybe longer duration? I don't remember now), getting them to look the way I wanted (which of course blew out the disc). I don't have an ASIAir unfortunately; they seem to be sold out everywhere. So I'm just interfacing directly from the camera to the USB on my Mac, using ASI Studio. I stacked the images with ASIVideoStack and I think I set the stack percent at somewhere around 30%. Again, I was just playing around so I didn't record all the details unfortunately. I clicked the "sun color" box to get the false color, and saved out two images - one that emphasized the disc and one that emphasized the proms.

 

One big change I think I could make would be to take the rubber feet off the tripod that comes with AM5 and put on the metal spikes to get a more stable base. I was working under a hood attached to the scope, and whenever I moved even a little the whole thing would jiggle. So that definitely affected the image quality.

 

I then opened the two images in Photoshop, made the prom layer my base layer, made the disc as separate layer, created a layer mask, and used the "burn" tool with a fuzzy brush to erase the top layer and let the prom layer show through. I had to nudge the top layer a bit to get the images to line up just right, then cropped it a little bit to clean up the edges.

 

Hope this helps! And it would be great to hear any advice from the "pros" (although my guess is that this advice starts with "buy a cheap PC, get AutoStakkert, RegiStax/waveSharp, ImPPG, etc. and get really good at using them...").

 

Obviously still a lot to learn, but I'm not sure how far down this very, very deep image processing rabbit hole I want to go...

 

Best,

Jaimie

[jaimie_h]

Ah, just discovered the .txt file that goes with the acquisition - here are the settings I used to get the disc photo:

 

[ZWO ASI462MM]
Auto Exp Max Exp = 30000ms
Auto Exp Max Gain = 300
Auto Exp Target Brightness = 100
Bin = 1
Brightness = 1
Capture Area Size = 1936 * 1096
Capture Limit = 2000 frames
Colour Format = RAW16
Debayer Type = NONE
EndCapture = 2025-05-18T09:36:10.177Z
Exposure = 1ms
Flip = None
FrameCount = 2000
Gain = 165
Hardware Bin = OFF
High Speed Mode = OFF
Output Format = *.SER
StartCapture = 2025-05-18T09:35:38.879Z
StartX = 0
StartY = 0
Temperature = 32.5 C
TimeZone = -7
Timestamp Frames = OFF
USB Limit = 100
USB Port = 3.0

[saguaro]

Great work! I have found that Mark Johnston's Youtube channel is a great resource for solar imaging.

 

https://www.youtube.com/@AZASTROGUY

[groom]

Thanks for all the encouraging words! I primarily got the scope for visual observing, but I'm dipping my toe into photography after many years as a night-time "faint fuzzy" hunter. Solar is a whole new and exciting world.

@rajilina, my method for getting that image was pretty ad hoc, compared to the sophisticated methods I've seen experienced folks on Cloudy Nights use (mostly on PC unfortunately). But I wanted something "quick and dirty" without having to 1) spend hours tweaking and 2) buy a PC. I rough polar-aligned my AM5 mount with the wonderful PS Align Pro software on my phone, and used SkyAtlas to start tracking at solar rate and slewed to the sun (which is obviously in the database). I have a B1800 blocking filter on a diagonal (got this one as it seemed the most versatile to do both imaging and visual). I used ASICap to collect several 2000-image runs at different exposures - as I recall the surface image used a 1 msec acquisition, and I played with the gain to make it look the way I wanted it while watching the real-time image. For the prom, I took some higher-gain exposures (maybe longer duration? I don't remember now), getting them to look the way I wanted (which of course blew out the disc). I don't have an ASIAir unfortunately; they seem to be sold out everywhere. So I'm just interfacing directly from the camera to the USB on my Mac, using ASI Studio. I stacked the images with ASIVideoStack and I think I set the stack percent at somewhere around 30%. Again, I was just playing around so I didn't record all the details unfortunately. I clicked the "sun color" box to get the false color, and saved out two images - one that emphasized the disc and one that emphasized the proms.

One big change I think I could make would be to take the rubber feet off the tripod that comes with AM5 and put on the metal spikes to get a more stable base. I was working under a hood attached to the scope, and whenever I moved even a little the whole thing would jiggle. So that definitely affected the image quality.

I then opened the two images in Photoshop, made the prom layer my base layer, made the disc as separate layer, created a layer mask, and used the "burn" tool with a fuzzy brush to erase the top layer and let the prom layer show through. I had to nudge the top layer a bit to get the images to line up just right, then cropped it a little bit to clean up the edges.

Hope this helps! And it would be great to hear any advice from the "pros" (although my guess is that this advice starts with "buy a cheap PC, get AutoStakkert, RegiStax/waveSharp, ImPPG, etc. and get really good at using them...").

Obviously still a lot to learn, but I'm not sure how far down this very, very deep image processing rabbit hole I want to go...

Best,
Jaimie

As to the rubber feet on the tripod, they help absorb vibration. If you replace them with metal spikes, your scope will continue to jiggle every time you move or otherwise bump your equipment, but the amplitudes of the vibrations would start out larger and take more time to damp down.

Edited by groom, 19 May 2025 - 07:17 PM.

[Aha63]

Gratulations from another rookie!