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John Hart
07-07-2010, 9:12 AM
Here's an image of Sunspot #1084 that a friend of mine at work created. It is his first attempt at this type of astrophotography and I thought it was cool enough to share. He gave me permission to post this on SMC(His name is Dennis Kulpa) His remarks are below:

I took this picture on Monday; it’s an image of sunspot 1084 before it rolls around to the back side of the sun. The video consisted of 1000 frames, processed in a software package called AviStack, took about 3 hours with over 2 hours of that just for the alignment process of the frames (press a button and then just walk away from the computer, watch a movie, read a book, etc). Then I took the final image into Photoshop to sharpen it up a bit and add the color (my camera is monochrome). I don’t think it’s bad for my first attempt, considering some of the images I’ve seen posted on the web. I really need to learn the processing steps in more detail, and I’m gonna have to pick up a better version of Photoshop ‘cause the one I’m using is just Photoshop Elements and it’s an old version.
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Stew Hagerty
07-07-2010, 9:26 AM
Very Cool. Camera Technology has advanced tremendously in the last decade or so. Digital imagry, compound exposures, It makes the really nice 35mm that I bought about a year or so before the digital revolution seem pretty sad. Bad timing is a bummer.

Like I said, very cool picture though.

bob svoboda
07-07-2010, 11:07 AM
Really cool pic. I'm getting an idea for a HF.

Jim Becker
07-08-2010, 10:13 AM
That is a very kewel shot!

Van Huskey
07-08-2010, 1:35 PM
It looks like it gave itself skin cancer...

Very cool image!

John Schreiber
07-08-2010, 2:18 PM
Very neat. What kind of equipment are you using? In general.

John Hart
07-08-2010, 3:19 PM
Very neat. What kind of equipment are you using? In general.

I didn't take the picture....but I asked Dennis if he would mind giving me an equipment list. I know you said "In General" but he gets kinda specific.:D

Daystar Quantum SE hydrogen-alpha filter (with 0.5 angstrom half-bandwidth) mounted on a Televue TV-85 refractor with a Televue 4X Powermate;
80 mm Daystar energy rejection filter mounted on front lens cell of TV-85;
Lumenera SKYnyx 2-1 camera (monochrome chip);
Celestron CGE equitorial mount for tracking;
Lucam Recorder software for image capture;
AviStack for image processing;
Software runs on an Apple MacBook Pro with 2.4GHz Intel core 2 duo processor, running Windows XP.

I expect/hope to be doing some more imaging this weekend – weather-dependent; if I do, I will take a few photographs of the set-up.

Initial imaging was 1000 frames captured at 15 frames/second. During processing in AviStack, final frame count for reference points & stacking was reduced to 964 (final image could probably have been improved with some additional frame reduction – started playing with this last night). Output image from AviStack was then processed in Photoshop Elements 3, using unsharp mask filter, then colorizing for final image.

Rick Markham
07-08-2010, 4:05 PM
That's an amazing photo, sounds like another expensive hobby... I don't need anymore of those! Tell him its a great picture, and to "get better at it" so us already broke woodworkers can enjoy his hobby vicariously through him :D

John Schreiber
07-08-2010, 6:27 PM
A long time ago, I had a job loading trucks. They all had small holes here and there along the top which meant was that when the hole was in the right place, and it was dark up near the front of the trailer, they served as a huge camera obscura. By holding a piece of paper in the light from one of the holes, I could track sunspots on the sun. If you have a job as exciting as loading trucks and have a lot of curiosity, you find ways to entertain yourself.