Please ZOOM in to full resolution for the animation. I loaded the animation at full captured resolution, so you can see the details. As a result, the animation may a bit slow to load. This is a follow up on the image I posted of the flare I captured:
https://www.astrobin.com/n1qv1t/.This flare is a precursor to the huge CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) event on Feb 13th, which you probably saw in the news. The flare in my animation is from the same active sunspot region 3576, which had rotated to right of centre by the 13th:
https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/news/view/521/20240211-m9-solar-flare-with-earth-directed-cme.htmlAs I mentioned in that post, I was twice lucky with this image!- My first good solar imaging opportunity since November!!!
- I had barely started acquisition when this amazing flare on the east (left) limb suddenly popped up at 10:09 EST, hit a maximum extension around 10:17 then dissipated by 10:26, so visible for a bit more than 15 minutes. The flare is associated with a large region where the chromosphere is pushing out “mountains of gas” above the usually spherical solar surface.
- Unfortunately, my luck to not extend to the viewing conditions, as seeing was average to poor, in part due to light cloud/haze passing over the Sun.
Imaging- This animation consists of 30 frames captured every two minutes.
- Each frame is from a 40 s SER video I took with 70 ms exposures at 14 fps, followed by an 80 second delay. Gain was set at 100 and the ROI was 2600x2600 pixels.
Processing - I used Autostakkert4 to stack the best 15% (86 frames) of the 573 frames captured for each video time point.
- I used ImPPG to do the solar surface grayscale inversion (bright areas appear dark on the surface, dark areas appear bright), while leaving the faint prominences and flare on the limb without inversion. I set the Lucy-Richardson Deconvolution to sigma=1.8, 500 iterations, and used two unsharp masks (sigma=1.6 and 3.0), using the adaptive settings and a threshold so as to not overly sharp fainter/noisier parts of the image.
- I added color and contrast adjustments in Photoshop. I did the animation in Photoshop, including an additional tween frame between each image for smoother animation.
- The final gif if 5 fps, so it is 340x real time.
My Layman's Guide to the Top 10 Things to See in Solar HaI did not include my list here, but if you missed it, or need a refresher, please go to any of my previous solar images or animations, for example:
https://www.astrobin.com/8qo75j/ 
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