Jupiter + GRS, from the 21/01/2006

[iceman]

Hi guys.

Here's a few images of Jupiter I took on Saturday morning.

The seeing was quite good, although there was a lot of moisture in the air and dew on everything!

I got about 8 avi's, roughly 5 minutes apart. I was going to make an animated gif showing some rotation, and I may still do so - but I haven't got time right now, and some of the avi's turned out better than others.

Here's 2 of the best avi's from the night, as well as the R/G/B channels from one of them.

Capture parameters:
- 1/25s exposure
- 5fps
- Gamma 0% (left) 40% (right)
- Gain approx 40%

I made sure the white meter in K3ccdtools was over 180.

Processing was limited to my usual routine this time around (Registax, AstraImage, NeatImage), as I didn't have time to play with the individual R/G/B frames - although I did get Bird's shell script working (in Windows) so that it creates the sets of R/G/B frames. When I get more time i'll see if I can get a better result processing the individual colour planes separately.

Quite happy with this result, better than my previous Jupiter on the 11th Jan. The increasing altitude certainly helps.

Comments welcome.

[ving]

great stuff mike, your best jupiter sofar i think. :)

looking forward to more when it gets bigger (already big of course) :)

[iceman]

Thanks dave.

I just finished reprocessing the avi that produced the image on the RIGHT (above).

This time, I used the netpbm tools to convert each frame of the avi into separate Red, Green and Blue channels (for each frame).

I then sent each set of BMP's through registax to create a "master red", "master green" and "master blue". I used mild wavelets at this step.

The red/green/blue masters were then brought into astraimage, where (individually) they had "Maximum" and LR deconvolution (5/2) applied. I then recombined the 3 colours into an RGB image.

I then did an unsharp mask, decreased gamma and decreased contrast.

It's a much smoother and more natural looking result. I'm definitely pleased with how it turned out, and it looks like this new processing method is the way to go.

[Striker]

Thats some great detail there Mike.....your doing a great job....well done

[ving]

the amount of surface detail you have there is outstanding mike! :)

[RB]

Stunner image Mike. Well done.
Looks like it's the way to go splitting RGB channels.


Keep em' coming Sir.

[Robby]

Simply stunning Mike!... Genius.

[[1ponders]]

Wow! That is awesome Mike.

[davidpretorius]

well done mike,

i must find time too to have a play with this scripting into r,g,b.

i will have another look later at these. they look great!

[Thiink]

Im liking that image scale Mike! Very nice image.

Are you taking your platform to IISAC? Would like to have a look-see.

[bird]

Well done Mike...lots of steps involved but worth the effort.

Bird

[rumples riot]

NIce image Mike, got the BA there also and plenty of the white ovals also some of the darks in the NEB. Good detail there, now I am envious.

[iceman]

Thanks for the comments guys!

I'm very pleased with the reprocessed version.. much more natural looking, still showing good detail without being overprocessed. But as Bird said, it's a lot of steps.. takes ages to process an avi now.. but if the result is better, then it's worth it.. no brainer.

Simon, I'll have my platform at IISAC.

Still have the Jupiter + GRS + Io avi's from this morning to go through now.

[acropolite]

Exceptional work Mike, amongst the best I have seen. :camera:

[rumples riot]

What is netpbm tools and how do I get it. This processing version seems very interesting to me.

[Glenn Dawes]

Mike,

I too would like to congratulate you on some wonderful images.
What was the time of the 2 avi's? You mentioned you took others on that same morning of the 21st - did you get closer (or even on) the time of the GRS's transit? I'd like to see how close the GRS's longitude was to the expected 103°.

I'd be interested in anyones image or even estimate from their observations (over the last couple of months) of the time of a transit.

Regards

Glenn

[davidpretorius]

here u are glenn, not quite finished, 6 or more so to go, but the times are shown so you may be able to work it out from there.date 16th january

[jjjnettie]

Very professional Mike.
Thanks for making the effort.

[bird]

Paul, check out netpbm.sourceforge.net, cross platform image mangling toolkit, commandline driven.

Bird

[robin]

Holy cow Mike. As if your Mars pics weren't enough, your Saturn/moons pic was fabulous & now your Jupiter is outstanding.You're raising the bar ever higher.I'm very impressed.

[iceman]

Thanks for your nice comments.


Glen, I can't remember the exact time, as I've deleted the original avi after I extracted the frames, so the timestamp is gone.

But, I'm using the "Jupiter 2" program for GRS transit predictions, and it has the input set to 103°. I can say that it's been accurate so far so with it's predictions so if it's not 103, it's not far off. I haven't been imaging while the GRS crossed the meridian, so I can't confirm for sure. Hopefully in the next few days i'll get the opportunity.

Regarding the netpbm tools, I downloaded the individual netpbm tools I needed from here:
http://tutornet.ru/TEX/Soft/MiKTeX/UTIL/NETPBM/GNU/bin/

Bird's script is written in unix shell, so it won't run on DOS. You can either try and convert it to work as a batch file (using dos batch language), or, what I did was download and install "cygwin", which is a unix-like shell for DOS. So you can run unix commands in a DOS window. The shell script then worked without modification.

Well, I added a few things to it such as passing in the directory to process images from, and adding the path to the front of the netpbm exe's.

Thanks again.

[bird]

Mike, another way to run those scripts is using the MinGW environment, it's slightly different to cygwin and it's what I use here.

www.mingw.org

Grab one of the self-installing MSYS exe's and you get a whole set of unix-like utils. The difference from cygwin is that no runtime DLL is needed, they are all native win32 binaries.

regards, Bird

[fringe_dweller]

Just Peachy Mike! geddit, geddit ;) that second one is evn more peachy! go the dobs yay! amazing -
ps like your saturn's too

[astrogeek]

Very nice shots Mike :) :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :P

[rumples riot]

Wow, Mike and Bird, you want to talk english. I did not understand anything you said. Any chance you can explain it in English what I need to do to split my AVI's into three for RGB processing in registax. My operating system is XP pro. So if you can explain that would be good. Not all of us are Computer analysts. I know how they work, some of the software, but not a lot of the jargon. Thanks

[Robert_T]

Mike this is fantastic, easily one of the best Jupiter's I've seen and approaching that classic of Damian Peach's from last year - love the natural look :prey2:

[davidpretorius]

the progeam aviraw will also split your non raw and raw mode videos into r,g & b, you can then convert them to bmps for birds ppmcentre or feed them straight into registax.

a lot simpler i believe!

[rumples riot]

Err lets not get too carried away here. It is a great shot there is no doubt, but it is not as great as Damiens work nor to my eyes as good as birds. Praise is good, but lets be real here Robert.

[rumples riot]

Mike I downloaded the tools but how do I use it to convert the avi? It just seems to be Dll file.

[Glenn Dawes]

David,

These are great images and have shown exactly what I was looking for. Based on your images the GRS might have transited 3-5 mins later than the predicted 3.29pm EST I had expected (based on long 103°). That's really not much when you consider its angular size.

Thanks

Glenn

[davidpretorius]

my pleasure Glen

[beren]

:thumbsup: Superb work there Mike well done

[Greg Bryant]

According to John McAnally of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO), the value of the Great Red Spot's longitude (as of December 20, 2005) was 104 degrees.