Improved Mosaics - Part 1

New Discovery!

I recently discovered a free program called "Autostich" written by Matthew Brown and David Lowe. This amazing bit of software combines and blends individual images into much better mosaics than the version of Photoshop Elements I had been using. I've been able to go back and construct new, improved mosaics from images I captured earlier this year. For example, consider this 9-image mosaic from images taken on April 7, 2012:

The upper image is a normal positive image. The lower image is inverted to highlight floating filaments. Autostich did an amazing job removing brightness variations across the image. Previous attempts with Photoshop Elements resulted in a patchwork of obvious boundaries between individual constituent images.

More examples of improved image combination are two mosaics from images made on July 7, 2012. The top image is a 5-image combination, and the bottom image is composed of 8 individual images.

These images are huge! The full-sized version of the top image is 2640 pixels wide, and the bottom image is 3658 pixels high! The blog format will not display these images in their full size, but click on them anyway for a larger view.

Here's one more mosaic from July 28, 2012. It's an inverted version of an 18-image mosaic with prominences, filaments, and sunspots. The full-sized mosaic is 2568 pixels wide by 3765 pixels high.