Here is my first experiment at creating a time lapse animation of a solar prominence. This was more of a test to see if I could work out how to put something like this together and whether it would be worth it. The quality is below average, but there is much more activity that I expected to see. The footage was taken back in November, but I had not gotten around to working out how to successfully get it all together in an animation until now. 

Its a fairly time intensive process:

• To get the source footage: I took a short 30 frame animation every minute over a 2 hour period. (The scope had to be constantly manually realigned to keep the subject roughly in the same place over that period of time ast it tracked the prom across the sky).
• Each of these animations is then processed separately to get a single stacked image for each minute. It took several nights to process them all.
• All 120 images are then aligned and de-rotated
• Finally they are all assembled into the final animation. 

Now that I have seen how much activity there was in a prominece over this period of time, this has motivated me to try again the next time I get an opportunity. Click on the image below to access the AVI. It is 36mb in size.

Here are a couple of nice solar proms I captured on the 28th of December.

Amazingly with all this activity around the outer there was no real surface detail on the disk. there was one feature near the centre but nothing worthy of the time.

My appologies to my visiting guest who after asking a couple of questions about solar photography, had to endure me capturing the source images for these proms when I saw this activity while giving a quick demo :-)

A while back I took a close up monochrome image of the moon. I took the photo back on the 21st September but was unable to actually process and assemble it using my old PC. I now have a 64 bit pc with alot more ram and that allowed me to finally put it all together. The image is a panorama contructed from an array of 58 images taken though my 12"lx200R scope using a DMK41 mono camera at prime focus.

 The full size image is rather large. Its approximately 6500 x 6500 and is over 126mb (glad I didn't go colour).

For the web I have had to use maximum jpeg compression to bring the files down to a managable size.

For best results use one the links provided to download the image or right click and 'open link'. This bypasses the built in viewer on my website which is no good for images of this scale.

I have included links to two different sized images:

• The full size is a 1.2mb download and is the full res.  Click here to download Full Size Compressed Jpeg Image (6500x6500)
• The Small one is 195k and is only 2000x2000 . Click here to download 30% Compressed Jpeg Image (2000x2000) 

The full res uncompressed image is not available as it too big at 126mb. 

Today I finished processing a rather large panorama of the sun. I must remember on those nice days not to get too carried away and take lots of source images. It always ends up causing several nights worth of processing and panel matching and blending and... hehe

The only problem with a panorama is that you dont find out until after the event that some of your panels did not turn out too well but you have to take the bad with the good.

Clicking on the image will use the flash loader to display it in a frame that fits on your current browser. Right-click and select open link to bypass this and open it in another window.

Been a while since I managed to get some imaging done. This is A1127.