Jupiter July 7th 2010

[Quark]

Hi All,

Imaged Jupiter this morning from 3:30am CST.
Couldn't see any cloud but the histo was swinging about 10% an a very regular basis for the whole session, seeing was reasonable.
Fortunately the histo in FireCapture remains live throughout and the gain can be adjusted on the fly but the variations made the colour balance interesting.
Have a pile of data but this was the best, just before dawn.

Thanks for looking
Regards
Trevor

[michaellxv]

Another very nice image Trevor.

[h0ughy]

nice work Trevor

[Clayton]

Now that's looking good!

[iceman]

Nice and sharp, subtle colours. Nice one!

[Lester]

Very nice Trevor, thanks for the view.

[Shiraz]

Trevor, that's a very fine image. It is particularly interesting to see the faint stream of turbulent eddies swirling across the planet in the wake of the GRS.
The sky was odd down here as well - was imaging a DSO until 2am and the signal levels dropped noticeably just before midnight, although the seeing remained OK. It also seemed that the visual contrast of the milky way had been turned down a bit.

[bird]

Good stuff Trev, nice to see you've found some clear sky.

cheers, Bird

[Quark]

Thanks Ray, up here the problem was very light high alt cirrus passing through in waves.



Thanks Bird, well, semi clear sky, but it was great to see a reasonable image on the screen for a change.

[Quark]

Hi All,

Finished processing all of my Jupiter data from July 7th, still have more Saturn data from the same date to do though.

Have attached a link to a 11 image animation, it is just over 600 Kb.

http://trevsastronomy.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoid=89994361

Bit dissapointed with how it degraded when saved as a GIF.

Regards
Trevor

[Scorpius51]

Lovely image and great animation Trevor. Well done!

John

[Paul Haese]

Nice going Trev. I really like the colours and the attention to detail. Low noise and high detail sharpness probably means the seeing was up around 7/10 or greater. I can tell you I am hankering for some nice seeing or at least no wind. Winter this year has been a very mixed bag and not one night of good seeing so far.

[Quark]

Thanks very much John



Thanks very much Paul, reckon the higher frame rate and greater bit depth helped for sure.

I rated the seeing at 6/7 due to the swings in the live histo of FireCapture. When the histo was up at the level that I initially set, the image looked good but the quality dropped off a bit as the cloud , which was very light, sort of nuisance value, came through.

For this image I dropped off 1000 frames per channel which still left me with 1000 descent frames per channel to stack.

I should also say that I am not capturing avi but 16 bit FIT files (well really 12 bit as Bird assures me that the final 4 bits are all zero's so I am only capturing 12 bits of data that contribute to the image. Not sure but I think that relates to about 4000 shades of grey.

The weather has certainly been against us for much of this year although, overall I have a reasonable body of data for Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. There have been occasions when the seeing has been quite good but just not as often as was the case last year.

Looking forward to this turning around as Jupiter approaches opposition.
Have you made the move to Clayton yet. If you are based there then hopefully you will get more opportunities.

Regards
Trevor

[Paul Haese]

Trevor, I have not moved down to Clayton. Getting married this year changed those plans. Another pier is in the planning at Clayton though.