Jupiter with the GRS in transit - 23 May 2021

[foc]

Jupiter and Saturn are not yet high at convenient times but are close enough for worthwhile images with modest scopes if your imaging is lucky and late.

Seeing did not appear to be very good and the captures were soft and pale but I still feel the resulting images were okay from my C8 on my EVO for this distance from opposition. I have certainly captured much worse this month. Jupiter is from a 3 minute capture that has been drizzled at 1.5x and then reduced in size by 10%. Saturn was a single 6 minute capture at 3am and is at capture size. Camera was a ZWO 262mc and the barlow was 1.6x.

[AdamJL]

Mind blowing!!

[foc]

Thanks Adam,

Overly strong praise coming from you Adam. I admired your Omega Centauri. I filled in some if the time prior to Saturn and Jupiter rising high enough on this night of 78% moon by crude unguided imaging of Ha targets with a refractor on my AZEQ5 fitted with the extreme filter and a modded Nikon 5600. It did not occur to me to try a non-Ha target under moonlight with the extreme but will do so now having seen your image.

[AdamJL]

thanks Ross. Omega Centauri is mostly just a point and shoot target. Not much doing with it so I didn't do much.
These images though... you planetary photographers really get some amazing things done. I can stare at images like this for hours, thanks for sharing!

[Hans Tucker]

That Saturn image for a single capture is quite impressive.

[astronobob]

Impressive indeed for a C8, 1.6x & out-of-Season planets Ross, awesome ...

[multiweb]

That GRS new look is pretty groovy. Much prettier than last season.

[Prickly]

Hi Ross

Excellent images and really like the processing. Unbelievable detail with the c8.

Look forward to catching up soon .

Cheers
David

[Stonius]

Nice one. One day I hope to be able to get something approaching this. I've been curious about the drizzling options: do you find it makes a big difference to the final image in terms of resolution?


Cheers
Markus

[foc]

Hi Markus,

C8 images are still pretty small so if you can 1.5x drizzle and get them larger they can look nicer to more folks! Should you drizzle? It is not worth it if the seeing is bad, in fact if it is bad often it will look better if you reduce the the image. But if the seeing is better then you often appear to get a result with a nicer texture, possibly because you can fine tune the image to noise a little better. Here it was probably just good enough to justify a small amount of drizzle in processing, at least in my non-expert hands. If the data looked really good, then use a 3x Drizzle and then perhaps scale the image down a bit.

At the moment getting clearish skies and then good seeing has been the challenge, I have been spending more time doing crude widefield DSO imaging in the last few months to help fill up the yearly astrobook with the EVO sitting waiting for reaiity and meteoblue to coincide with some good seeing. In poor conditions one can also do some stuff with IR or in this case with my attached image for June a CH4 filter showing Europa in transit and on the LHS the GRS and obviously best left in the reduced size it captures in.

As always I am expecting that good seeing will be soon :)

And thanks to everyone who liked my images, and as well as some excellent planet contributions by others, I am always very impressed with the high standard of DSO and solar imaging here.