Jup August 5th in good to very good seeing

[Quark]

Hi All,
Well what a night, early on the sky was covered with light cloud although I could still see Jupiter and the occasional bright star through it.
I had contact Anthony the previous night regarding a processing problem that has been dogging me with my Jupiter images, a ring inside the limb. We had come up with the probable solution, the default gamma setting in IC Capture and I wanted to capture some data to test the solution. Lester had also suggested this may be the problem in a reply to the images that I posted yesterday.
It was quite strange really, the changing density of the cloud played havoc with my histogram but the detail such as the GRS seemed very well defined. A quick and extremely heavy handed process of an avi could not produce the ring artefact so I just filled in time monitoring my Peltier cooler for later in the night when the Bird Strike would appear.
At 11pm CST it was as if a switch had been thrown, the cloud disappeared and the seeing was very good. The image was very steady and the live feed to my laptop looked almost like a processed image, in fact I think I have processed images on some nights that were not as good as what I was seeing from the live feed.
The material from the impact that had previously wrapped around a light coloured oval is still discernable but much dimmer than on August 3rd.
I have posted 3 R channel images and 2 RGB’s. The first of the RGB’s is the best image I have taken for this apparition. I have also posted a 200% crop of the impact region taken from my best RGB. I have also attached a very high res R channel animation of the Bird Strike.
Thanks again for your time Anthony and also Lester for your suggestion.
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/uploads/20090805BirdStrike.gif (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/uploads/20090805BirdStrike.gif)
Thanks for looking
Regards
Trevor

[Paul Haese]

Fine image Trevor, however, I think maybe the seeing was a little less than you might have estimated. The detail or loss of fine detail suggests to me that there was high jet stream interactivity with the next layer down. It can be identified by large structures being visible but really fine detail is blurred and the image goes in and out of slight focus really rapidly.

I know you are not new to all this, and you are seasoned campaigner.

[Quark]

Thanks Paul, my Peltier has changed my opinion regarding the seeing conditions. I suppose the poor run with the weather over the last month may have affected my estimate of the seeing.

Also, I am sure that as my processing technique evolves I will get more from my data. I think in another 12 months I will produce a better image from this data set.

Cheers
Trevor

[erick]

Impact site is certainly smearing out now.

Thanks Trevor.

[Paul Haese]

Trevor I reckon your processing skills are excellent now; yes the peltiers really make a huge difference to how we determine seeing. I have heard lots of people say the seeing is rubbish when in fact it is their optics that are causing the problem. You would now appreciate how much cooling has affected you own judgement of seeing.

Like you I thought the seeing was good last night until I had a quick check on my good data I keep on tap that I took in June and last year. I quickly realised that the seeing was ok but not exceptional. I find that referring back to good data often helps in the determination of seeing. Especially when one has not imaged for several weeks (or in my case months), the excitement of getting some data at last can make one think they are onto something big. Not saying this was with you, but I can appreciate how this happens even with myself.

This is still good data and JUPOS will find the data very useful. I find the colour balance between our images is also very similar, perhaps there was some particulate matter that was shared over the distance and had an effect of providing a wash in the colour.

Such a great and dynamic planet, it will soon be gone for us and then we are onto Saturn. Imagine the images we will get then. But I digress.

Well done again.

[Lester]

Good on ya Trevor, I am glad you are getting some reasonable results and the ring is gone. The jetstream is playing havoc down here.

All the best.