Prominence Aligner Pro


http://sweiller.free.fr/Softwares/ProminenceAlignerPro/PAP.htm

v2.0 *** ***     2025/11/04
© 2025, Sylvain Weiller
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No installation required!
Simply place all the files together in a dedicated non-system directory
(e.g., `Users\ProminenceAlignerPro\...` or `Appexe\ProminenceAlignerPro\`).
My configuration:
(click on screenshot below for full size) ...

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**Introduction**

Born from the Advanced Eclipse Aligner, Prominence Aligner Pro v1.0 is here!
This project has already required a massive five months of development and testing, totaling almost a thousand hours!
I know it's not yet giving good results in many difficult cases or that the best parameters are not yet finalized.
Future versions will be tasked with finding solutions for these issues and correcting eventual bugs.
I am waiting for your feedback on sweiller[at]free[dot]fr .

Creating stable animated GIFs of extremely active prominences that change shape over several hours is a challenging task.
PAP, aiming to solve this problem, required hundreds of hours of development and testing.

It is designed to handle the entire process for you almost automatically and quickly, working on entire directories without the need for any additional software.
It can process hundreds of images obtained from registered solar videos acquired, for example, at a rate of one per minute.
These images, which must be in PNG format for this version, are often slightly different in size, but this is not an issue since preprocessing takes care of it.

The only work left for you is to:
Carefully place 3 reference points on the solar limb: once to obtain already well-aligned images, and a second time for what I call super-alignment!
Adjust certain interface parameters, most of which will likely remain unchanged in your future sessions.
In V2.0 there is a new exclusion zone in SuperAlign for difficult cases to isolate the most quiet parts!

Tutorial

This tutorial uses some of the H alpha acquisitions of a fast moving prominence, taken in the morning of 2025-05-25.
For more than 2 1/2 hours, 1 min videos where recorded one after the other, in SER format (I used FireCapture).
All were given to AutoStakkert4.12 for registration. The result was 157 enhanced PNG images.
See in the table below a few of them, after their conversion into JPG for posting here.
You can click on them for full size.
You can see immediately many problems to solve to get a smooth animation ... Different sizes, defects, important shape differences, etc...

 

Below is a reduced (33%) animation of a large part of the AS4 registered images (all the ones before the scope had to be rotated after passing the meridien) ...

Let's start working to get the nice animation we want !

Start Pre-Processing

Job done by Pre-processing ...
Image verification: Keep or reject frames if they are too large, too bright, too dark, or contain many dark pixels,
Resize: All images will be standardized to the same dimensions,
Rotation: Orientation adjusted based on the "Limb at..." setting,
Saving: Cleaned BMPs generated in the ICQ subfolder for the next processing steps.

For 'PAP' processing, the prominences must be positioned above the solar disk.
If this is not the case, e.g. for the second part of a session when the telescope has been rotated after meridian,
choose the nearest "Limb" option — Bottom, Left, or Right — as needed.
The pre-processing will rotate all the images accordingly.

Click on 'Start Pre-processing' and select any media file inside the folder containing your registered (PNG, TIF, JPG, BMP) images.

During the quick check, you will be asked whether to keep or remove suspected bad frames
(too dark, large black areas, too noisy, too many black pixels, or unusual size).
If you can, it's always better to Reject !

Examples of problematic images (all not used in this tutorial):

The remaining pre-processed images will be saved in BMP format in the ICQ subdirectory for the next processing steps.
Note: if the source images are in TIFF 16b/channel then the thumbnails could be looking almost white ... but no worry at all, the images are fine!
(Windows does not perform well in this case)

 

Initial Calibration

Look for and open ICQ folder then click on any image

For reference, this is a full-size ICQ images (click to see the full resolution).
Compared to the original images, you can see all the sophisticated cleaning that has been done!

Below is what will appear after clicking on an image.
It is a thresholded image (binarization) used to enable proper calibration of the Sun.

As there is still a small amount of prominence visible  here, you must increase the default value of 205 using the '+1' button.

If you go too far, you will get this... In that case, lower the value with the '-1' button.

Here is a satisfactory result as it shows a rather clean limb and only the very bright base of the prominence!

When done, click anywhere in the image to confirm, and proceed to the next step.

Place three points very precisely on the limb using left-clicks,
ensuring they are as far apart as possible (use scrollbars) and in the deepest parts of the limb (minimal activity level).
As mouse clicks are often imprecise, if needed, refine the vertical placement of each red point using the Up / Down buttons.
Right-click in the image at any time to fully restart the red point placement.
When satisfied, click the mouse wheel inside the image to validate.

Then the limb of the Sun appears in black ... Or ...

If 'Colored Circles' is checked , six colored circles will appear, with their distances in pixels from the limb shown in the label,
and also a white tangent line in the middle of the picture, a green line towards the far away center, and a red dot in the middle of the arc segment used.

Examine the prominence and especially its size in pixels...
When ready, click 'Process folder' to continue and start the automatic alignment of all the images in the folder!

After an optional rough crop, the processing will start immediately! It can be aborted with the red STOP button.
When completed, the Aligned folder will open for viewing the aligned frames.

For a quick animation, open the first image of the Aligned folder with IrfanView and hold down the right arrow key.
Now, one of two things is true: either the prominence is already very well aligned, or it isn't, in which case you need to switch to SuperAlign to try and improve things.

If the alignment is of good quality, I suggest you proceed with colorization using SolarGun in batch mode
(it's so fast, it would be a shame not to use it) and then create the GIF and/or MP4 animations.

 

Super Align

Manual mode (not recommended, only for special cases).
After you have placed 5 points on dark zones of the prominence...

Next screen shown with 'Colored Circles' checked...

Click on SuperAlign

Pixels which will be used ...
The red point is the center of Gravity.

Auto mode is the only one remaining in V2.0 as much more sophisticated ...
With proper parameters, the most active (white) zones are not taken into account!
This is a very good reference!

Close the window and either validate or redo ...

NEW IN V.20

As some particular prominences evolve very fast and as sometimes completely new bright zones appear,
I did a lot of trials to exclude the most difficult parts and keep the quietest ones finally using an exclusion polygon.
The results are really smoother using this trick ...

Creating GIF or MP4 (same process)

I suggest you proceed with colorization using SolarGun in batch mode
(it's so fast, it would be a shame not to use it) and then create the GIF and/or MP4 animations.

Nothing to show specially except for cropping ...
The image shown is the max luminosity value of all the frames!
(here using optional 2x luminosity to be able to see better the extent of the prominence during the session)...


End of tutorial ...