Jupiter from Murrumbateman

[bird]

EDIT: To cut down on thread pollution I'm going to keep posting new images into this thread for a while. Check for new images below as I get them.

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March 2nd:

I couldn't resist posting this image into its own thread... the seeing around 6am this morning was just fantastic, as you can see from the result!

This was with Jupiter at an altitude of 40 degrees, and I was only using about 10m focal length instead of the normal 14m that I prefer to use on Jupiter (I have been using 10m on saturn and decided not to change it over).

From now on I'll be going back to the 14m focal length for sure...

Capture: 60 seconds in each channel, R@40fps, G@50fps, B@35fps
camera: PGR Dragonfly2 mono firewire

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

What a ripper, Anthony. I'm glad you've been able to take full advantage of these clear and steady skies the last week or so. Your account is well and truly in the black.

As we said on email, if you can get this sort of image at 45deg altitude, it bodes well for Jupiter apparitions in a few years time when that's the maximum altitude we'll get.

[Dennis]

Hi Anthony

If there was a Jupiter event at the Beijing Olympics - this image would win gold! You're really optimising everything under your control to reveal so much fine detail.

Cheers

Dennis

[OneOfOne]

:thumbsup:

[bird]

March 2nd: and here's an image from about 10 minutes later than the first one...

Bird

[iceman]

Nice one Anthony - very similar to the one I just posted from the same morning! :)

Except yours is bigger and more detailed :whistle:

[bird]

Thanks Mike, I also have data from an hour earlier that I'll try and work up into a decent image... after reading Johns report I think he could use an image showing oval BA & "LRS" a bit closer to the cm - do you have any data from around 1800Z (5am) ?

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

No, my earliest was at 1830Z and is in the animation. The seeing wasn't great at that time.

[bird]

March 2nd: This is the best I can do , from 1803 Z approx. The red core of the new anticyclonic oval is visible.

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

Fantastic image Anthony, especially given the altitude at that time!

Excellent work.

[matt]

Some very nice images there, Anthony.

You must just be counting the days now until it's directly overhead and you've got some of that fabulous June/July seeing around your way:)

[bird]

Yep, watching the seeing closely - this is our first year living out here and so I'm not sure when the best seeing is to be had. I've been surprised by a few of the mornings so far - great seeing right up to sunrise, and mist sitting around in all the valleys, not a breath of wind anywhere... I hope it continues!

cheers, Bird

[matt]

Oh OK.

I just remember from previous discussions we've had that late autumn and early winter seem to be particularly good around that region.

I know they were when I lived in Canberra. My best images were captured around that time...two years in a row.

Obviously, you're a litte way out of town and your topography is different too.

Anyway...good luck!

[bird]

yep, they sure were, that was around April I think (from memory), still about a month away... Fngers crossed that means the seeing will stay good for the next few months.

With Jupiter moving 1 month every year it wasn't really possible to get any images in February last year, Jupiter was just too low. Even the early March images were poor due to low altitude so it wasn't really possible to test the seeing.


cheers, Bird

[bird]

Jupiter this morning, March 5 UT

[iceman]

Very interesting Anthony - mine has rotated a bit further around but some of the same features are visible.

[bird]

Jupiter from last year...

While waiting for the Good Seeing I'm going through data from last year, here's an image that was never processed, it's been sitting on my hard disk since June 22 last year :-)

This is probably the best image of Jupiter I've ever managed, and I have fingers crossed to get more seeing like this when J is at the zenith starting in April...

Link: http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/jupiter/20070622-134208/large.jpg

regards, Bird

[iceman]

Holy crap! That just smacked me in the face.

Absolutely stunning result. That's amazing.

[Dennis]

Wow Anthony – it’s so difficult trying to keep up with all these superb Jupiter images and then somehow find the brain space compare them to previous efforts, but boy oh boy, this one certainly looks tops!

The detail is simply exquisite.

Cheers

Dennis

[bird]

Jupiter this morning - 6th March 1918z

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Here's a copy of an email I sent to a colleague who lives about 15 minutes away. He was also up and observing jupiter this morning but found the view to be disappointing when he was looking (at about 5am). This was my reply:

"Jack, this morning the seeing was awful until about 5.30am, and then it improved steadily until it was quite good around 6.15am.

Bear in mind I only look at Jupiter in these sessions, part of the "seeing" that I find is related to it's altitude and relative location. I don't know what it was like elsewhere in the sky.

I nearly packed it in at 5am, the seeing was really poor. This can be predicted if you look at last nights temperature profile - it was unusually warm early in the evening, still 23C at 9pm when it should have been down to about 15C. Something was preventing the heat from escaping, I guess an inversion or some other impedance boundary was present in the lower atmosphere that trapped a lot of warm air and prevented the ground from radiative cooling.

Whenever this happens you can be sure the seeing will be appalling - both during the warm period when there is a nasty boundary layer present above you somewhere and also when this layer breaks and the heat starts escaping normally again you will get lots of convective turbulence in the air, also kills the seeing.

BOM was predicting an overnight low of 13C which was looking unlikely when I was still reading 20C at 10pm last night, but I took a gamble that the inversion would break sometime and the air temp would eventually equalise to the predicted value, so I set the scope cooling for 10C and went to sleep with the alarm set for 4am.

Well, at 4am the inversion was gone and the air was cooling rapidly, with the associated awful seeing that comes along. Luckily my guess was right, and by about 5.45am the air temp was down to 12C, and my mirror had slowly thawed from 10C up to 12C after I turned the cooling off at 4am. The turbulence abated and I got some reasonably nice images of Jupiter from 5.45 to 6.30 showing this mornings GRS transit. "

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

Nice, Anthony. Excellent commentary on local weather and a beautiful GRS image to boot!

DP and I thought you must've been snuggled up in bed when we didn't hear from you ;)

[bird]

Interesting contrast - here's the same basic image as before, but this time all the sharpening has been done in the L (luminance) layer after decomposing the image into LAB and then recombining.

This is sort-of cheating because the colour information is not sharpened but it looks pretty good. This is a popular technique but not one that I've had much success with.

Bird

[bird]

No resampling this time, this is native size.

Item of interest: a very intense white storm has formed in the South Equatorial Belt just preceding the GRS.

[bird]

This mornings images in fair to good seeing, just waiting for Jupiter to gain a bit more altitude...

Bird

[Dennis]

Another stunning sequence Anthony - top stuff yet again. Thanks for sharing these gems, I know a lot of hard work, effort and time under the skies and in the computer room goes into producing them.

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman]

Very nice indeed - Io looks excellent.

Much better than my attempt from this morning!

[bird]

A great view of the progression of the white storm imaged above on March 8, it's evolved into a pair of intense white storms with material streaming away from each in opposite directions. This dramatically shows the jetstreams at work in the jovian belts.

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

Wow that's very cool, Anthony. Great capture.

[bird]

A frustrating morning - the seeing looked very good but a lot of haze and high cloud dropped the transparency by about 50%. Here are two images showing the contrast between a low altitude Jupiter and a not-quite-so-low altitude. The last image would have been taken with J at approx 50 degrees.

The shadow of Ganymede can be see in the second image, whit the "new" LRS is visible as an intense orange storm close to oval BA in the first image, with the GRS just sliding out of view.

regards, Bird

[iceman]

Beautiful images, Anthony. I'm going through mine from this morning now.. looks like I missed the best of the seeing.. my first run (around 5:30am) is looking like the best :(

That'll teach me for capturing too many deep-space images.. I had exposures still running until after 5am!

[Alchemy]

this thread is jup city.... check out all the images.

while i am here there was a rumour an article was to be put up about rgb combining of images..... anyone got any info?

Love your work guys

Cheers Alchemy

[iceman]

It's coming soon, Alchemy. Almost finished.

Damn that reminds me I was going to take some pictures tonight.. :doh: will do it tomorrow.

[bird]

Here's the best result from this morning, nothing special this time as the seeing was quite poor by recent standards.

I found (by accident) that thsi image aligns closely with an image from 2 days ago and shows cloud movement with respect to the GRS. ie the GRS is stationary in both images and we can see how the rest of the weather systems move.

Oval BA and the small red spot adjacent are slowly but surely being pulled into the GRS. Also if you look at teh GRS in this animation you can see a small dark spot being pulled in and munched :-)

cheers, Bird

[bird]

hi All, image from this morning, seeing was v.poor today as a precursor to the change in the weather coming through...

Mike and DP were out imaging as well, I think Mike had the best of it though.

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

That one looks better than the preview from earlier today.. more time spent processing to get the best out of it?

[bird]

not much more time, just a little tweak here and there. There's not a ot more to be done with it.

Bird

[bird]

but interesting to compare to images I was getting in 2004, this would have been amongst the best back then. How times change :-)

[Lester]

All very nice images, as always Anthony.

Looking forward to more.

[matt]

Great stuff, Anthony.

Really enjoying these images and fascinating to watch them improve as the season progresses.

You're already getting very nice detail this early.:eyepop: It's going to be terrific to see what you produce as the planet climbs higher.

Fingers crossed for you that you get a nice run of excellent seeing.

[janoskiss]

Wow what a collection! Thanks for the lovely images Bird!
The rapidly changing surface is fascinating too.

[bird]

Three images from this mornings session, the seeing was only average but nice to capture the area around the GRS anyway, now that Jupiter is high enough for imaging over a 2 hour period.

cheers, Bird

[bird]

After a couple of weeks of crappy seeing here's an image in very good conditions from this morning...

cheers, Bird

[matt]

Very good, Anthony.

Look at all that detail.:eyepop:

I particularly like the rippling in the SEB in the wake from the GRS.

Well done.

[iceman]

Wow Anthony, absolutely brilliant!

[davidpretorius]

yes that is superb!

[Dietmar]

EXTREMLY spectacular, Anthony!
color are perfect, details amazing, and yet it looks so natural.
in other words: this is perfect!

[Lester]

Top image there Anthony.

Well done yet again.