EclipseStack
Concept
Alignment for hundreds of RAW frames captured during totality, ready to hand to a stacking tool for HDR composite work. The hard part isn’t detecting the solar disk in any one frame — it’s bridging the frames where the disk is occluded or the contrast is wrong, without losing sub-pixel precision.
The approach combines two signals: confident frames where the solar disk (or the moon’s silhouette) is unambiguous, and a temporal-drift model fitted to the camera’s EXIF timestamps. The drift model fills in the alignment for the awkward frames, and solar flares act as secondary anchors for sub-pixel and rotational refinement.
Architecture
hundreds of files, full-totality span"] DET["Disk / Crescent Detection
solar disk · lunar silhouette"] DRIFT["Temporal Drift Model
EXIF timestamp regression"] FLARE["Flare Anchor Detection
sub-pixel, rotational"] ALIGN["Sub-Pixel Aligner
confident anchors + drift fill"] UI["Web Review UI
drift paths · seed confident frames"] OUT["TIFF / FITS Export
ready for HDR stacking"] RAW --> DET RAW --> DRIFT RAW --> FLARE DET --> ALIGN DRIFT --> ALIGN FLARE --> ALIGN ALIGN --> UI UI --> OUT
The web UI exists because eclipse data is finicky enough that fully-automatic alignment is the wrong target. The tool’s job is to be confident about the easy frames and visibly honest about the hard ones, so a human can seed the gaps.