Saturn Aug 18th +63 disturbance

[Quark]

Had a good night last night Aug 18th with 2 hours of quite reasonable seeing. Targeted the +63 spot which crossed the CM during this session. Have 5 685nm IR data sets at approx 20 minute intervals, have 2 Rchannel data sets 30 minutes apart and 1 RGB, all data is now on PVOL. Have put together animations of the IR and R data to better attempt to identify any EZ features which I have attached. The IR animation very nicely shows the +63 spot over 2 hours of Saturn rotation, the hex and polar vortex.


Regards
Trevor

[Somnium]

really fascinating, the animation shows the movement well

[kkara4]

Agreed, fascinating Trevor. Question, how do you do the circular projection, and how do you tell if the 63N is supposed to be facing you so you can verify its presence?

I mean in scopes with less aperture (like mine), clearly the storm is there on your image haha.

[Matt Wastell]

Hi Trevor
Fantastic animation of the region - fascinating stuff!

[Quark]

Thanks Aidan.



Thanks Krishan, The polar projections are done in WinJUPOS. You save an IMS measurement file of the particular image and use that file in "Map Computation" to create a "Stereographic polar projection", its that simple.
Saturn is my speciality, currently I have close to 3000 images on the PVOL and IOWP data bases so I have considerable experience at eeking out fine detail & structure on Saturn. Regarding the +63 feature, I first imaged it in March 2014 and have been tracking it ever since. I put my data into a spreadsheet and from that generate a drift chart. The position of the data points on the drift chart show if it is the same feature or just sporadic random features. My spreadsheet calculates the drift rate, which for this feature is very consistent at 11.4 L3 degrees per day so I can accurately predict when it will be available to image. I also have generated an ephemeris using WinJUPOS which has turned out to be quite accurate.



Thanks Matt.