Jupiter this morning - 13/01/2005

[iceman]

Hi guys.

Went out imaging this morning at around 3:30am - the sky was clear, no wind, and the seeing was great, one of the best seeing days i've had in a long time - and hopefully my images reflect this!

I took about 24 short avi's of jupiter, and combined them in groups into 8 separate avi's so that the features hadn't rotated from the start to the finish.

I took several @ 10fps and the rest @ 5fps, just experimenting.. The shutter speed was 1/50s, gain and gamma were 0. All taken with the 10" dob @ f/10 (FL2500mm) & ToUcam.

I think these are better than my attempts on Monday - there appears to be more detail in the banding, and it looks like the blue barge (whatever that is?) can be seen in the middle equatorial band.

Again, appreciate your comments, advice, suggestions, and your pick of the bunch :) The large one was resampled @ 1.5x just for kicks.

http://www.iceinspace.com/images/images/planets/20050113-jupiter1all.jpg

If you want to try obtaining a better final image from my avi's, please go for it and try all you like. If it comes out better than mine, that's great! As long as you tell me what you did, how you did it, and I can repeat it. :D :lol:

Jupiter1-combined.zip (http://www.iceinspace.com/images/images/planets/jupiter1-combined.zip) (~4 meg)

Jupiter7-combined.zip (http://www.iceinspace.com/images/images/planets/jupiter7-combined.zip) (~2.5meg)


For a bit of fun (yeh, I was bored), I also took some quick avi's of alpha-centauri and acrux.

Alpha centauri:
http://www.iceinspace.com/images/images/deepspace/alphacentauri.jpg

Acrux:
http://www.iceinspace.com/images/images/deepspace/acrux.jpg

I had to stop imaging after that, because my dog knocked the laptop off the chair and made the screen go all haywire.. It bent the wireless modem card when it hit the ground too.. but luckily it still works (phew)!

Thanks for looking!

[[1ponders]]

Nice pics Mike. Definately on the improve. Must have been a good night all up the coast. I'm game to have a play with them.

Do you have the mag Astonomy 2005? If so, do you check out when the GRS will be visible on page 116?

[iceman]

yeh I've got it, and I checked on the S&T website yesterday to see when the GRS is visible.. It's not visible at that time of the morning for a few days.. i'll definitely be trying to capture it when it's visible at the time I normally image (3am-5am).

Go for it! :D

[gbeal]

Very nice Ice, like we all said you would get better, and these prove it. I am downloading the smaller version to "try" it. All care, no responsibility.
Perhaps plan ahead with a moon transit as well, these really stand out if the seeing is good.
Gary

[[1ponders]]

God how do you get up that early. By the time I'm finished a 2:30 the last thing in my mind is getting up at 3:00 :D

[gbeal]

You need kids Paul, mobile alarm clocks.

[[1ponders]]

I've got kids. They know better than to wake dad up. Or even speak to him before he's had a bowl of cereal and a cup of tea. And even then wait half an hour.

[ving]

i take 2-3 cups of coffee to ge going inthe morning :)

nice pics ice. getting better. was playing around with your picture and got this... do you think i improved it?



http://ffm.junetz.de/astro/planeten/pictures/jupiter.jpg

[iceman]

hmm, it's not bad.. but it's a bit dark around the edges..

Thanks for trying though :D :lol2:

[gbeal]

Too much waveltting Ving. Back it off a little.
Ice, I can't do much with the smaller downloaded version sorry.
It was weird watching Registax when the three separate clips went across the screen. Weird.
I think you need to shoot as many frames as the moVING target will allow, but from our end the stitching together may or may not have helped.
Sorry.
Gary

[Striker]

Great shots Mike...good to see everyone helping out so much....I am so proud.....

[iceman]

Gary, i'm not sure what you mean..

The small one decompresses into the original 150meg avi that I used and processed through registax to produce image 7 - the right hand image on the 2nd row.
Registax handles the 3 separate avi's fine - you just need to click the "misalign warning" box so that it prompts you to realign with the new avi.

Jupiter is hard to shoot too many frames, because after 1.5 minutes the features start moving as the planet rotates, so I try to capture as many frames as I can during a 2 minute period. At 2500mm FL, jupiter stays on my FOV for about 9 seconds - and at 10fps, that's 90 frames. Then realign, and try again.. So 300-400 frames is about the most I can get in that period.

[[1ponders]]

So that's how you did it without registax popping up with a loss of alignment warning.

I ended up splitting it into three avies in Virtual Dub then processing each one then combining the resultant three images. Didn't make much difference though to your efforts :D

Its nice when you learn something new each day :)

[silvinator]

Ving, maybe if you had the jupiter image the right orientation, then maybe I would have believed you :doh:
Ice, how come the pics with 5fps (namely images 6, 7 and 8) seem a lot brighter? Well, I like those pics the best. Job well done! These are great jupiter images.
I hope that your laptop isn't too badly damaged. My one was bought used and the guy before it must have banged it real hard because I have a persistent white line at the bottom of the screen, which grew from one line to several fat lines now (about 1cm thick), so just beware.