I give that a serious "WOW", Darren! Jack
----- Original Message ----- From: "Darren Addy" <pixelsmi...@gmail.com> To: "PDML" <pdml@pdml.net> Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2014 10:44:48 AM Subject: PESO: Sunspot Group 2192 with K-3/Bigma Decided I couldn't let Sunspot Group 2192 (the largest in 24 years) get away without trying to capture it. I slipped my home made solar filter over the Bigma's hood and tried some captures with the K-3. I have yet to apply the AF adjustment to this lens (but sunspots would be an excellent way to dial it in, I think!) so I attempted it with manual focus using an Olympus Vari-Magni attached to the viewfinder. I still don't think I got a single frame perfectly sharp. I think I forgot to turn off Image Stabilization. Images taken at high shutter speed and f/9 or so. 12 second self-time was used in an attempt to reduce vibration. So I evaluated all the images and picked the 3 that appeared closest to sharp and converted the DNG to TIF. Then I cropped them to 2000 x 2000 pixel squares and aligned and stacked those 3 images using the free Registax6. Here is a screenshot image that shows the improvement made by this Registax6 processing. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/15609849676/ Pixel-peeping has its place in astrophotography post-processing. :) This was simply to get the best image to perform post-processing on. I'm still learning to post-process solar images and so I followed the recipe given by this guy: http://www.perseus.gr/Astro-Tips-Solar-Process.htm Thanks to his reducing the image twice, this results in a smaller image than I would have liked (only 845 x 845) but I saved copies at each step and may go back and try to adjust his process to save a larger version. Here is the Flickr page of the final result: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/15634739362/ Comments and criticism welcome in equal measure. Darren Addy Kearney, Nebraska -- Life is too short to put up with bad bokeh. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
