April 2nd, 3rd - 2020

The sun were having some cool activities, so I took out the solar telescope and I was very happy that everything was still working especially my DIY remote focuser and Pressure tuner, for the two days I captured two prominence time-lapse using FireCapture. Each one was 200 videos 10sec each with 30sec delay in between.

My setup is Lunt LS60THa solar telescope and ASI290MM camera on iOptron CEM25P mount, with a DIY Arduino controller to control the focuser and pressure tuner. You can find further info about this setup in the below link.

https://www.cloudynights.com/…/609170-lunt-ls60tha-diy-rem…/

Now processing it was a nightmare and it goes this way:

1) Stacked 15% of each video using a program called AutoStakkert3 (The nice thing is if the prominences or the feature in the video is in the same spot then you can load up all 200 video do the stacking process on one video and it will repeat it for the remaining 200, you simply go and relax)

2) Sharp and crop the stacked frames in PixInSight, again you can adjust the sharpening parameters using (RestorationFilter and UnsharpMask process) and then add them in ProcessContainer and then add all the stacked images in an ImageContainer and apply them to all in one shot.

3) For some reason PixInSight won’t create an identical image size so I had to run it through PIPP software to crop all the frame to the same resolution.

4) Loaded all the images back in AutoStakkert3 to align them, I just have to ANALYSE all the frames then go to (Frame View) uncheck (Auto) from (Scaling) and then export them all from (Export Frame) this will export them all with a very good alignment of the prominences.

5) Create an action in Photoshop to add the dark disk to cover the sun’s overexposed part, enhance the image and change the frames to color.

6) Run all the frame again through imPPG software to better align the prominences time-lapse

7) Add the scaled earth and signature to all the frames using Photoshop.

8) And last create the video usually AVI and GIF files so I can upload share them.

Now couple of cool things is how fast those prominences move within two hours time-lapse and I also scaled Earth next to those prominences and just look at how small are we next to the Sun's mighty activity, simply speechless. Hope you like it.