I tried something a little different today. Instead of the 120-180second AVI recordings that I usually make, I went to 240seconds. That’s about 1100-1300 frames per video. Then I stacked the best 20%, 30%, 40%, and 80% of the frames in each movie. Comparing the stacks, I concluded that 40% yielded the best composite – optimal sharpness and detail.
A 4-minute AVI consumes 20-40 gigabytes of disk space. So, I have decided to stack my AVI frames to make the best possible single image and then discard the AVI rather than archiving it. I’ll go through a lot fewer 1TB micro-SD Sandisk drives that way.
Below are today’s images and their highlights.
The sunspot group in the upper left is AR3814. Below and to the right is AR3815; AR3813 is to its right, and AR3816 is above it. AR3811 is the rightmost. Other, fainter groups ae also visible. The cameos of the larger groups look like this:
With the instrument tuned to showcase the prominences, we have this view.
The bright plages adjacent to some of the sunspots have been the sources of many solar flares the past couple of days; the plage around AR3814 is shown below. The most remarkable prominences are featured below beginning with those along the North and Northeastern limbs, clockwise around the solar disk to the South pole.
