Jupiter & Europa, morning of 27th May 2009

[Quark]

Hi all,

Well, I thought the good seeing before midnight may have carried through to this morning. Was up at 3:30 am CST and captured 4 RGB's

Have attached the final image of the four taken at 19:20 UTC.
The seeing was better than I have had for a while but not quite as good as I had for Saturn early in the evening.

This RGB was captured with a DMK 21AU04 on a Orion filter wheel with Astronomic RGB filters with a 16" F4.5 Newt, GEM, Annsen Technologies dual axis drive & drive corrector, JMI Moto focus and Peltier cooling system.

Each channel was captured for 40 seconds giving about 1200 frames / channel. This image is the best 400 from each channel from my final set of avi's for the night.

I expected better images than I produced. I think my primary may have been just outside the ideal temperature range at the time of capture. I had set it to automatically fire up at 3:00 am and it pulled the mirror down fractionally to far. The closer to dawn the better were my captures as the ambient drooped closer to the mirror temp. My scope seems to have a sweet spot for temp at between ambient and half a degree above.

Still some fine tuning to do in this regard.

Thanks for looking
Regards
Trevor

[Astrobserver99]

A fabulous image Trevor.

Cheers, Rob

[RobF]

Yes. Keep 'em coming Trevor. Love looking at your work. :)

[iceman]

That's a very fine image of the GRS, Trev.

Excellent work!

[Inmykombi]

Nice detail there Trevor.
And the GRS is smack in the middle too.

Well done.

Geoffro.

[kinetic]

Mighty fine effort Trevor,
colours always look a good match on your
stuff.

I hope this cell of air stays around for a while.
Best seeing for months. I always make a note
of saving the MSL chart and jetstream chart when
it's this good.

This pressure system is not going to move much
in the next few days so and you're not that far
away up there from us down here.
Clear skies!

Steve

[Quark]

Thanks Steve, yes I have been regularly checking the position of the jetstream, it has been giving me grief for a week or so but looks bonza now. Tonight I had a group of year 9 kids from MLC school in Sydney and showed them Saturn. Used a 6mm Ortho and it looked just great, very steady indeed. Hope this persists till the weekend, I think there is another Titan shadow transit.



Thanks Geoff, that is just about the most detail I have imaged inside the GRS.



Thanks Mike, had to go back to Registax 4 to process it, V5 seems to work well with Saturn but I cannot seem to sort out my processing with it for Jupiter.



Thanks Rob, love the challenge of trying to improve my data and what I do with it.



Thanks Rob, appreciate your comments.

[Jen]

:eyepop: you get some amazing pictures Trevor well done i would kill to have my own pic of jupiter and saturn to put on my walls :thumbsup::thumbsup:
keep em coming cheers :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:
:D

[Quark]

Thanks Jen for your very kind words.

[StephenM]

That's another great image Trevor! The detail in and around the GRS is fantastic. Well done!

Cheers,
Stephen

[Paul Haese]

Nice image Trevor, looking forward to getting out there myself.

[Quark]

Thanks Paul, just had a look at the latest synoptic chart of the jet stream and it looks pretty crook. There also seems to be a fair bit of cloud on the way, bugga, I was hoping for descent seeing for the Titan shadow transit Saturday night.



Thanks Stephen, I was pretty pleased with the detail in and around the GRS, If I haven't damaged my satellite drive with all of my data on, it had a coming together with the floor, I think I have found a better way to process my Jupiter data in Registax V5 to eek out finer detail.

[bird]

Hey Trevor, that's a very good image, well done. Yes the temps can be very fiddly to get right...

cheers, Bird

[Lester]

Nice image Trevor, showing a lot of interesting detail.

[Quark]

Thanks Lester, still think I can get more from my data. I am relatively pleased with this image but still have a long way to go to get the the standard that you set earlier this apparition.
I have to be more precise with my temp control.



Thanks Bird, I have noticed each morning that I have imaged Jupiter that the temp has seemed quite stable, only dropping a degree or two just before dawn. With my cooling system set at minimum performance I had it fire up 1 hour before hand, this resulted in my mirror being about 2 degrees below ambient and was detrimental to image quality.

Then I tried starting the cooling system 30 mins beforehand which had my mirror 1. 4 degrees below ambient. One and a half hours latter my mirror was still .6 degrees below ambient and the images was starting to noticeable improve.

I think I will get up earlier and not use my timer to start the cooler, but run it as required to attain the sweet spot for my particular optical system, which seems to be between ambient and .5 of a degree above.