Gallery XXXXIII -  4/15/06

                A moderately clear day so I decided to set up. I put the Solarview 50 on a Teegul II  mount on a Bogen tripod that sat on the tracking platform for the 20. A polar aligned mount for solar videography. I was unimpressed with the images off of the Phillips ToUcam so I resorted to the Meade Electronic Eyepiece and the Stellacam I. FOV was larger in the Stellacam. Mead has a manual contrast adjustment which is a boon for solar videography. Is it the best tool for videography of the sun? All images were obtained with an IR filter.

                   This was shot with a Stellacam I (B&W, 640-480 pixels) from Astrovid. Gain was off. ELC was 1/6000. I had a 2.5x TV Powermate in place. I think it is dirty inside. Contrast was adjusted. Acquired with software using ImpereX A/D card - as I could not get CCD3 to recognize the 'S' video input to the card. Processed the  AVI in RegistaX 2. Used the wavlets. Adjusted brightness. Tweaked with curves tool in GIMP. It looked funny about the edges so I heavily cropped it. An active solar area.

                     This was shot with the same. This was reduced 75%. Big filament.

So I tried again. Black dots I think are artifact in optical train. So just how do you get a flat field for solar video?

                                       Here I removed the Powermate and refocused. The solar disk just barely fits in the frame. Active areas are seen as white. Filaments are black. I shot a lot more, but that was before I realized that the camera control would show up in the final video frame - oops. Less data to process.

                                         I changed from ALC to ELC modes and manually adjusted the exposure. This shows some surface detail.

                                          Same data, processed differently. Active regions are easier to see.

                                          I changed over to the Meade Electronic Eyepiece. I manually focused and contrast adjusted. These AVIs were made with KCCD3 Tools. It sees channel 1 of the ImpereX A/D card just fine. These were cropped and windowed with the curves tool in GIMP after video processing using RegistaX 2. Tried to capture surface features. 3 runs of 2 different areas. The MEEP has a limited FOV. These were shot using the 2.5x powermate.

I tried to capture the big prom. I need better image scale and field of View.

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