Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Neptune - 9 June 2020

[Tulloch (Andrew)]

Hi all, for those not on CN, another early start on the coldest Melbourne morning since August last year, with the Mercury sitting at about 2*C.

Jupiter was less than 2 degrees away from the almost full moon, so it probably not ideal for imaging. However, the five videos I took of the planet came out pretty well, the two shown were the best of the morning.

Saturn was nice and high also, I took a few images of it and the best is attached.

Mars is obviously still pretty small, but I was able to get some surface features showing up.

Finally, I noticed that Neptune was nice and close to Mars, and since the red planet wasn't offering much, I set out to image Neptune. After a bit of hunting, I was able to grab a few videos of Neptune, and even managed to evince Triton with some levels action in Photoshop. Note that the image of Neptune and Triton below is a composite, with Triton's brightness and size shown larger than actual.

All these images taken with my Celestron Evolution C9.25" with TV 2.5x Powermate and ASI224MC camera. The Jupiter images are from a stack of the best 7500 out of 26000, Saturn used the best 5000 out of 18000, Mars the best 5000 out of 60000 and Neptune used the best 2000 out of 6000. Jupiter and Saturn shown 50% larger than captured, Mars and Neptune shown at double captured size.

Andrew

[jahnpahwa (JP)]

Far out, not a bad morning's harvest! These are really spectacular

[N1 (Mirko)]

Those are excellent! Well done. A great reward for rising early.

[alpal]

Hi Andrew,

Such wonderful images - thanks for sharing.


cheers
Allan

[Outcast (Carlton)]

Nice shots..

Waiting for clouds to disappear here in FNQ & then hopefully out for some planetary & deepspace imaging...

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

Excellent planet images, at least the cool temperatures are good for the camera sensors if not for the fingers. Thanks for sharing.
Just curious but with a file size of 26000 frames for Jupiter, how many Gb is each avi, approx. and how long does it take you to process each avi to get each image, again approx.

[Derek Klepp]

What a great mornings catch.Theses are really good with the 9.25” scope.
Looking forward to the next edition.
Cheers Derek

[Tulloch (Andrew)]

Hi all, thanks for the comments, I think it was worth getting up at 3 and braving the elements

The Jupiter videos aren't too large, I image Jupiter for 3 minutes (so as to reduce rotation blur to a minimum) and have found that 150 fps is a good mix of noise with frame numbers. Each avi/ser file is not too large, 5 GB or so. The big ones come with trying to grab the moons around Jupiter or Saturn, this image of Saturn (5 minutes at 100 fps) with 6 moons came in at around 20 GB, my biggest is 26 GB!

Processing doesn't take too long for Jupiter, maybe 20 minutes in AS!3 with 3x drizzle (longer with the big Saturn avi's), Registax takes a minute, Photoshop takes as long as you want - I played around with a "soft focus" effect (details here) so that took a bit longer than normal to get right.

Total time? About an hour for Jupiter, less time for the others.

Andrew

[Dennis]

Outstanding work - very impressive results.

Cheers

Dennis

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

Thanks for the feedback about the file sizes, frame rates etc, most interesting.

[Quopaz (Nick)]

Very good, nice and sharp. Love that Mars!