Hi everyone
It's been a while since my last post on this forum and I thought the time has finally come to dust off my Meade SCT and resume contributions. This being a Mars year I wanted to test drive the scope on high altitude Jupiter with previous attempts yielding mixed results when it was still 'down' in northern declinations.
Was going to get up at 3 on Sunday morning but slept in and finally made it outside quarter to 4. Luckily I had the scope aligned and the only thing left to do was centering and focusing (which always proves challenging at high F ratios). To make matters more interesting there was quite a lot of speckle cloud around with the image periodically disappearing from the preview. I've got a newly build notebook and had to repeat initial camera set up and colour calibration work again (using colour version of the ASI). It was a warm morning for CBR with not much wind so managed to get through these steps in relative comfort...
Being late I've missed Ganymede and Io shadow transit but managed to capture Io egress and both moons in close proximity to the planet. Imaged for around 2.5 hours with some periods of very good seeing (lots of detail in live preview). Half way through the session I was tempted to switch planets (Mars and Saturn following) but did not do so due to intermittent cloud. A window from 6 to 7 yielded very steady conditions (just in time for GRS to rise).
Here are some of the best results - WJ images are 9 minute derotated exposures with North on top. Low avg frame count at F30 / variable seeing meant that individual stacks combine only about 830 usable frames each. Including a snapshot of the FireCapture screen when the preview image was particularly good.
Thanks for taking a look.
Cheers,
Seb