1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

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1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by H-Alpha »

Hi all,

Today the seeing was acceptable (average SSM 1.6-1.7", with minima @ about 1"), so my plan was to make a "very" long H-alpha animation where the sunspot, surface activity, dancing proms and filaments and if possible even the sun's rotation would be all visible. I masked the Lunt130MT @102 mm and there we go!

My 1T hard disk (some 800G free) became full with 130 frames taken during exactly 1hour, plus 5 captures for photos. The resulting Animated GIF, although heavily cropped, was still some 125MBs. I thought it was really worthy to upload it, but should find a way to make it a smaller file. It took me 3 hours... :-( I converted the GIF to m4V and became 6.3MB!!! Wow I said! But then how to make it continuously looping? Impossible! I had to reconvert it to GIF (30MBs), but the quality was dropping significantly. At the end I found out that QuickTime is supposed to export it to looping .mov. It does loop on my desktop and it is just 6.4MBs!!!

I hope it loops when uploaded here as well...

Many active solar features! The proms are dancing (other slowly, other rapidly), the central filament is "smoking", the surface is boiling, and if you focus at the bottom right corner you will observe the rotation of the sun!!! It could be a much more active day (hope such days are ahead of us), but I am already very happy I have it "all in one"! :-) :-) :-)

I just realized .mov appears here as a link and does not play automatically... :-(. If you click on the link below and chose to open it with the Windows Media Player (hopefully other media players too), it will play immediately and will be looping only if in you turn your player's option to loop. :-( Or just click on "Play again", as long as you want to watch it again.

The original in full resolution and no compression is much better but still hope you like it.
1h, 130 frames, Animation Cropped, 2021-6-17.mov
(6.36 MiB) Downloaded 143 times

Best wishes,
Alexandros
Last edited by H-Alpha on Fri Jun 18, 2021 7:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by viewer »

Very nice! Especially the filament lifting off is amazing.


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by DeepSolar64 »

Alexandros,
This is both well done and beautiful! Nothing shows the Sun like a good animation and yours is excellent!

Despite the hazy patch in the objective lens the Lunt 130MT seems to work well.

James


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by LeoD »

Amazing movie, Alexandros!
Big work well done, very clear view. Could you describe in brief, how did you make batch processing?
thanks for sharing
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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by banjo »

superbe.gif
superbe.gif (23.39 KiB) Viewed 933 times
bow.gif
bow.gif (27.42 KiB) Viewed 933 times
Sans titre 1.gif
Sans titre 1.gif (10.9 KiB) Viewed 933 times


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by stef41 »

magnificent animation of a great fluidity! :)
bravo!

Sincerely,
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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by ffellah »

Excellent work Alexandros. Love the animation.

Franco


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by Montana »

This is your best ever!! I really enjoyed it, so much going on and it loops great :bow :hamster: :movie

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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by H-Alpha »

Thank you all so much Viewer, James, Leo, Paul, Stephane, Franco, Alexandra, for your nice words and encouraging comments!
LeoD wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 5:02 am Amazing movie, Alexandros!
Big work well done, very clear view. Could you describe in brief, how did you make batch processing?
thanks for sharing
Leo
Dear Leo, thanks for your interest. I try in brief ;-) below and if you need further details please do not hesitate to come back.

1) First I stack them all directly in Autostakkert!3 (all at once in a batch process that takes a lot of time, but do not need me to be there :-) )
2) Then I take one stacked image (usually the first) and try to find the best settings in ImPPG to improve it in the best way I can.
3) When happy with the result I save the ImPPG settings
4) Then I improve all the stacked images (batch processing...) in ImPPG. To do this, I have to load the ImPPG settings previously saved and indicate the folder with my stacked images, plus the output folder.
5) Then once more in ImPPG, I align all the improved (stacked) images and save them in a different folder.
6) Next comes Photoshop where I further improve them and add colour. I do this automatically in batch process. I have previously created an Action in Photoshop that does all (Hi-Pass, Levels, sharpenning, shadows, Colour etc. are used following Marty's tutorial in Youtube) at once. This is my standard improvement and not repeat it with each separate animation. I always use the same. To make the Batch process in Photoshop there is a a menu under File/Scripts/Image processor, where I indicate my Actions, folders with the files and output format (I use jpg, quality 12).
I will try to find the way to perform this step 6) in GIMP instead of Photoshop, but did not have the time yet.
7) now I finally have all my coloured final frames and open them as Layers in GIMP. Here I only make a final crop if needed and then create the animated GIF. In Filters-->Animation a have a preview and then in Export As I create the Animated GIF, et Voila! :-)

I hope it helps. It took me a while to find all these paths and little 'secrets', but I am so fascinated with what we can all do with our solar scope and see the sun alive, that could not stop until I find the way. Of course, I have been helped a lot by questions like yours that I made here to people of our wonderful solarchat community, who are always very willing to help and share!

Best wishes,
Alexandros


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by Ivan »

Hello Alexandros

It's just amazing to watch this sozheo endlessly, wow. Congratulations, you have a masterpiece.

Why did you aperture up to 100mm?

Ivan


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by eroel »

Alexandros:
Superb animation.
Thanks for the info on how to make an animation.
Never have made one.
Regards,
Eric.


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by GreatAttractor »

Excellent animation.

It seems that penumbral waves are visible around the sunspot (similarly to here).


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by krakatoa1883 »

Great animation, you have done an excellent work. I follow the same steps for my own animations but I use GIMP instead of PS for generating the gif.


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by p_zetner »

Beautiful animation, Alexandros!
Cheers.
Peter


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by H-Alpha »

Thanks a lot Ivan, Eric Filip, Raf, Peter for your kind words!
I am glad you liked the animation and observed so many things.

@Ivan: My scope is 130mm and I mask it at 102 mm quite often, because the seeing is not so good, or it is not good lomg enough for a long animation...

@Eric: You are very welcome! You have to try. It's a lot of fun. Great expectation and curiosity until you the final result... ;-) And then the sun becomes alive!

@Filip: Thanks so much. I wasn't aware of the penumbral waves! And now see there's a lot of scientific work on them. In your animation they are fantastic! In mine they are just visible. i will try to run it faster to see if they are easier to see. ;-)

@Raf: Independent paths of parallel evolution! ;-) :-) :-) Actually I also generate the gifs in GIMP. I only put some filters and colour in PS before GIMP.

Best wishes,
Alexandros


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by minhlead »

Great work, Alex.
How come your raw video so big? I see that you are using a 290MM which have relatively low res. How many frame you are capturing each shot?


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by cmas »

I'm gonna say it in a short way: WOW!


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by LeoD »

Thanks a lot, Alexandros, for detailed explanation!
Next time I´ll try ImPPG instead of AstraImage and compare the result. As to me, for animation usually I take 200 frames from 1000 every 30 sec, sure if seeing is stabile.
regards
Leo


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by H-Alpha »

Thanks a lot for your kind words Minh, Tommi, Leo,
minhlead wrote: Sat Jun 19, 2021 2:11 am Great work, Alex.
How come your raw video so big? I see that you are using a 290MM which have relatively low res. How many frame you are capturing each shot?
Thanks Minh. The ASI290MM gives 1936x1096 videos. Is this what you had in mind? I capture 3000 frames per shot and this creates files of 6.2 Giga when the frame rate (depending on the exposure) is about 170 fps. What does not seem right for you?

All the best,
Alexandros


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by minhlead »

H-Alpha wrote: Sat Jun 19, 2021 7:10 pm Thanks a lot for your kind words Minh, Tommi, Leo,
minhlead wrote: Sat Jun 19, 2021 2:11 am Great work, Alex.
How come your raw video so big? I see that you are using a 290MM which have relatively low res. How many frame you are capturing each shot?
Thanks Minh. The ASI290MM gives 1936x1096 videos. Is this what you had in mind? I capture 3000 frames per shot and this creates files of 6.2 Giga when the frame rate (depending on the exposure) is about 170 fps. What does not seem right for you?

All the best,
Alexandros
The file is too big. Are you capturing in 16 bits? If so lower the bitdetph to 8. You can recover some bitdepth by stacking.
Also 3000 frames seems excessive for animation. I think 1000 will do just fine. Just my 2 cents


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by AJamesB »

Excellent animation, love it!


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by H-Alpha »

Thanks a lot Minh and James!

[/quote]
The file is too big. Are you capturing in 16 bits? If so lower the bitdetph to 8. You can recover some bitdepth by stacking.
Also 3000 frames seems excessive for animation. I think 1000 will do just fine. Just my 2 cents
[/quote]

Minh, your input is always very welcome. It was you that inspired me to try long animations. ;-)
Today I tried 2 hours and you will see the post/results. I just realized what you said the other day! and I also took my lesson...

Regarding file size..., I capture in 8 bits. Cannot go further down :-( The seeing would not allow to drop to 1000 captures most of the days; if not some frames would not be clear at all! :-(

Best wishes,
Alexandros


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by Valery »

H-Alpha wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 1:48 am Hi all,

Today the seeing was acceptable (average SSM 1.6-1.7", with minima @ about 1"), so my plan was to make a "very" long H-alpha animation where the sunspot, surface activity, dancing proms and filaments and if possible even the sun's rotation would be all visible. I masked the Lunt130MT @102 mm and there we go!

My 1T hard disk (some 800G free) became full with 130 frames taken during exactly 1hour, plus 5 captures for photos. The resulting Animated GIF, although heavily cropped, was still some 125MBs. I thought it was really worthy to upload it, but should find a way to make it a smaller file. It took me 3 hours... :-( I converted the GIF to m4V and became 6.3MB!!! Wow I said! But then how to make it continuously looping? Impossible! I had to reconvert it to GIF (30MBs), but the quality was dropping significantly. At the end I found out that QuickTime is supposed to export it to looping .mov. It does loop on my desktop and it is just 6.4MBs!!!

I hope it loops when uploaded here as well...

Many active solar features! The proms are dancing (other slowly, other rapidly), the central filament is "smoking", the surface is boiling, and if you focus at the bottom right corner you will observe the rotation of the sun!!! It could be a much more active day (hope such days are ahead of us), but I am already very happy I have it "all in one"! :-) :-) :-)

I just realized .mov appears here as a link and does not play automatically... :-(. If you click on the link below and chose to open it with the Windows Media Player (hopefully other media players too), it will play immediately and will be looping only if in you turn your player's option to loop. :-( Or just click on "Play again", as long as you want to watch it again.

The original in full resolution and no compression is much better but still hope you like it.

1h, 130 frames, Animation Cropped, 2021-6-17.mov


Best wishes,
Alexandros
Alexandros,

Looking at this animation, I can say with a confidence that your problems with a good quality of High Res images with C8 are definitely not the only seeing as the reason. You need a full size DERF, perfect collimation and focusing, good Ha etalon, SSM and then hunting for best seeing in hours when a good seeing moments are most frequent (early morning before 9:30 and 1-2 hours before sunset).


Valery


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by torsinadoc »

Very nice animation. There is a lot of activity.


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Re: 1h Animation of many solar activities, 17 June 2021

Post by H-Alpha »

Thanks a lot Valery and Alan!

@Valery: Capturing early in the morning is not an option from my balcony. :-( No sun view in those hours... The Hi-Res and a DERF for C8 is of course in my list, but I should first be certain that I will be able to get clear images with it, when all other factors will be under control. Once I will have acceptable WL with C8, I will make the DERF step.

Best wishes,
Alexandros


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