Posts Made By: Mike Ashburn

I have been fortunate and grateful for three days good weather so managed to image AR720 at the same time on three consecutive days. This sequence is the result and it shows how rapid the growth in this sunspot has been

Each image is just a single good frame from a short 15 sec avi from my Sony handycam. My stacked images seem to look unnatural. The avi was de-interlaced with avisynth / virtual dub and images given a levels adjustment slight unsharp mask in Gimp. The result convinces me that single frames at high shutter speed can give a better result.

The full disc was taken with a Canon A40 2 MP digicam at 1/1500 sec. The Canon just couldnt do as good a job as the handycam at high resolution.

Thanks for looking, cloudy weather again so please keep posting AR720 images.

Mike

Yesterday we had a bad storm with 3 inches of rain in 1 hour and a tornado, unusual for NZ. The evening cleared up nicely and I managed to get several avi's . This is the result of the first one processed. Looks better from a distance.

Best wishes Mike Ashburn

Hello Kent,

Have you tried FLASKmpeg (freeware) video conversion utility? I have no experience with it but it may be able to do what you need.

Mike

Yes Robert a nice picture,

Its amazing what can be done witn low end equipment (and free high quality software). I have an ATM 6" f8 Dobsonian (Orion plate glass mirror) and my eye piece and Barlow are made in Tiawan. My camera is a Sony TRV17E with Carl Zeis vario sonar 10 x optical zoom.

But shame on me, my wife complains that I never take movies of the kids anymore!

I'm still learning, here is one of my recent images.

Mike

Ivan, Jeff and Brian many thanks for your words of encouragement.

To answer Jeff's question on the colour shift in the A ring. No I didn't notice this visually at the eye piece but then I was not specificaly looking for it. When I process the image in registax the raw stacked image is quite yellow but with some slight colour differentiation in the A ring visible.
When I look at the 'histogram and RGB' The blue chanel plot is shifted to the left and the red chanel is shifted to the right. I then play around with the colour weights to bring the peaks in each of the RGB histograms into line. This seems to bring out the colour shift. The resultant image, apart from some unsharp masking, is the one I posted.

I have tried to induce the colour shift in the B ring by adjusting brightness , contrast and RGB weights to see if its a result of my processing and I couldn't do it.

I have seen some images on this forum show the shift and others that don't seem to show it. Next time I am observing I will look for it.

Best Wishes Mike

Hello Vincent, looks like a very good image to me, great work.

Mike Ashburn

Hello Andy,

you could go to this page

http://ringmaster.arc.nasa.gov/tools/viewer2_jup.html

and input the time of the shot (universal time) and fill out the other fields and it will let you download a post script file which will show you diagram telling you what they are. You may also need a post script viewer eg Ghostscript/Ghostview to read the file. There are probably easier ways but this works for me.

good luck

Mike Ashburn

Well done Paul, Seeing at my location was poor too so Ive been waiting for the first images to roll in.

Mike, Kawerau, New Zealand

Many thanks Paul for the opportunity and thanks to all the contributors for their excelent work. It was a thrill to work on such a good image.

Mike

Here is another this time AR708, taken a few minutes later (03:29 UT). This time with 0db gain and 1/450 sec exposure and just the 32 mm plossl. I have added a bit of colour

Its very similar to one posted by Paul Maxson a few days ago. Even within a few hours there are changes to the area around the sun spot.

Mike