Lunt LS60 first light videos of solar prominences (Rick Veregin)

Lunt LS60 first light videos of solar prominences

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

I recently showed by first light static solar prominence image with my new Lunt LS60MT/BT1200.

But I also want to try doing some videos of the two largest prominence areas. The videos are not long, but I wasn’t sure how well they would turn out—not to mention my acquisition laptop only has about 100 gB space for images. Also, I wasn’t sure of the quality of what I might get, seeing was only average and the sun was very low here in southern Canada.

Each capture was a 30s 16 bit ser video files of 800 images, stacked at 25% with 3X drizzle in Autostakkert, then wavelet sharpened in Registax. The 16 bit raw files were clearly much better than my 8 bit, a lot more detail. And the 3X drizzle really worked wonders on resolution as well as to reduce pixelation when I crop in.

My though is a solar eclipse every clear day, so I went with an "eclipse look", with dark solar disk and colored the prominences in red (color burn in PS) as Halpha at 656 nm, so RGB=255,0,0.

For the first video I took 30 second exposures every minute for 10 minutes total, for the second 30 seconds every 1.5 minutes for 12.5 minutes total. I think every 1 minute looks a bit smoother. Each stack was first manually aligned, to enable alignment in PIPP. Then in Photoshop the eclipse look was enabled and gifs were produced.

I was really happy with this first go, only wished I could have gone longer time in the videos. The videos are reasonably stable, but I think I see some FOV rotation—my polar alignment was not great and I suspect that PIPP can’t handle FOV rotation that well??? Next time I will go for longer videos.

CS day and night all!
Rick

Final
Original
B

B

Description: 2nd area of prominences.

I turned down the vibrance on this one, but I probably would like something in between the two images, the first may be too saturated?

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