First try at a big mosaic and an animation

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FlankerOneTwo
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First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by FlankerOneTwo »

Seeing was surprisingly pretty good yesterday (12/12) mid-morning, so I had a go at a 6 panel mosaic and an animation. My alignment is never that good in the daytime, so I used LuSol Guide with a little 50mm guidescope on top of the LS 80 DS, works great! I'm pretty pleased with the result, but then again I'm a beginner at this and pretty easily pleased at this point. The usual AS! 3, Astra Image / Photoshop processing chain. Processing took forever, because I used a 5x Powermate, so was using almost the entire sensor of the ASI1600.

What do folks use for mosaics and animations? Photoshop Photomerge never got the joins quite right and MS ICE just doesn't ever seem to work for me. It ignored the second row completely no matter what I did (which you can't really do much in there). Affinity Photo finally managed to put it together cleanly.

Manually aligning frames for the animation was a huge pain - is there software that can do this more automatically?

Reduced previews below, full res mosaics (9K x 9K) at
http://astrob.in/325635/0/
http://astrob.in/325639/0/

Animation (50% size, the full res is 4K x 4K) at
http://astrob.in/325674/0/

Comments / constructive criticism welcome. Thanks for looking!

-Patrick
Attachments
Loop-smaller.gif
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Mosaic_b invert prom med res.jpg
Mosaic_b invert prom med res.jpg (265.56 KiB) Viewed 2277 times
Mosaic_b med res.jpg
Mosaic_b med res.jpg (281.44 KiB) Viewed 2277 times


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by ffellah »

Excellent results, Patrick ! The animation is lovely and the mosaic came out great...

Franco


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by PlanilAstro »

very beautiful


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by Montana »

Fantastic images!!
Use ImPPG for sharpening and then use it to align an image sequence for an animation.
I have some helpful instructions here https://solarnutcase.livejournal.com/18572.html
There are many reasons why the mosaic software won't work but getting the right pictures to input is key.
Alexandra


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by dvoss »

Really nice animation and disks Patrick.

For mosaics, I've had some luck with Autostitch

http://matthewalunbrown.com/autostitch/autostitch.html

which comes in Mac and Windows versions.

David


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by rsfoto »

Hi,

Very very good result. The problem when making mosaics from the sun is if the illumination of the whole area is not very even then Photoshop will not do it. Happend to me very often if the imaging conditions are too good. Sometimes a bit of haze helps in this case.

You can try it with AutoStitch ...

regards Rainer


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by marktownley »

Good results!


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by GreatAttractor »

Very good results, I especially like the animation.

Just a small observation, the prominences in the animation seem abruptly clipped. I suggest letting the lower end of the histogram blend smoothly to black.


My software:
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ImPPG — stack post-processing and animation alignment
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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by FlankerOneTwo »

Hi all, thanks for the suggestions! I will give imagePPG and AutoStitch a go.

Re: the clipping, I noticed that as well and may have a go at reprocessing the frames; I'm struggling with how to sharpen the prominences adequately without inducing blob artifacts in the glow above the surface. My strategy here for a quick go at the animation was a fairly high black level, which resulted in the sharply clipped edges. Alternative suggestions are welcome, it's been a bit of a headache for me!


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by MapleRidge »

Hi Patrick...

An excellent animation and full disk images...nicely done :bow

Brian


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by Derek Klepp »

Patrick great results all round I like that animation.


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by FlankerOneTwo »

Montana wrote: Thu Dec 14, 2017 12:51 pm Fantastic images!!
Use ImPPG for sharpening and then use it to align an image sequence for an animation.
I have some helpful instructions here https://solarnutcase.livejournal.com/18572.html
There are many reasons why the mosaic software won't work but getting the right pictures to input is key.
Alexandra
Alexandra, thank you - that page is a treasure trove of information! Just add another item to the list of things I found out after it was too late :-)
Your imagery is amazing, really gives me something to strive towards!

BTW, do you have any suggestions for sharpening prominences without creating blobbly sharpening artifact in the surrounding glow? I've experimented with a few different methods of trying to select and blur or fade this before sharpening without consistent success.

Thanks!

Patrick


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by robert »

Wonderful animation!
Robert


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by Montana »

Patrick, the only thing I have found that helps with this is
1. good seeing - in this case you won't need very much sharpening and therefore see less artifacts
2. If your gamma is set to high then you get these sharpening artifacts on the edge. Reduce gamma to nearer neutral
3. So salvage your images, use two images, one you have sharpened and one you have not. Overlay in Photoshop and blend the best of both photos together in a natural way (use the unsharpened image to cover the artifacts).

I hope this helps
Alexandra


FlankerOneTwo
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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by FlankerOneTwo »

Hi Alexandra,

Thanks for the suggestions! I have not been using gamma, so I might fiddle with that a little bit and see if I can find a more optimal setting.
In the meantime, using a layer mask on a sharpened copy and overlaying it on the unsharpened layer seems to work pretty well and is not too difficult to do. Learning more about Photoshop every day!

Patrick


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Re: First try at a big mosaic and an animation

Post by Carbon60 »

Nicely done, Patrick. An excellent animation sequence and good FDs.

Seasons greetings.

Stu.


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