Jupiter 11th Feb 2006

[bird]

Believe it or not, this is the first night this year of decent seeing. I was starting to wonder if I'd get to use The Monster at all...

I have many runs to process, I think there are some which will improve on this but it might take a day or so to find them.

Seeing was about 8.5/10 most of the time with momentary improvements to about 9.5/10. The small white polar storms were visible most of the time, and that made things a lot easier as I could use them to focus on. It can be a bit of a viscious circle otherwise - if the seeing is bad then I can't find details to help focus on, so the result gets even worse. So it was nice to find a night of good seeing.

After I had finished imaging at around 6am this morning I popped in an Ep and spent some time visually observing. Ganymede was a nice small disk showing darker spots, and there was still enough good seeing about to get glimpses of lots of surface cloud detail on Jupiter.

This image is the original size, here are the details:

Scope: 13.1" f/5.5 newtonian on a G-11 mount
Camera: PGR firewire Dragonfly Express
640x480 @ 30fps, 16bpp monochrome data
Separate RGB channels, 30 seconds per channel
Registax, Astra Image, GIMP.

regards, Bird

[davidpretorius]

those images are awesome bird, well done!!!.

can't wait, i am going to have a shower and fingers crossed they will be uploaded, can't wait can't wait!

[davidpretorius]

watch the compliments come flying in, well done bird, at last the seeing has come your way.

the grs seems to be chewing em up like mike mentioned. lovely detail!

[Starkler]

I wondering when we were going to see a Jupiter from you :poke:

Awesome pic, well done :eyepop: :thumbsup:

Do you notice much difference in use compared to your old 10 incher?

[iceman]

Awesome pic Anthony. That's huge image scale! No resampling in that one? It doesn't look as oblate as it should.. or is it just because it's upside down? :)

Glad you finally got some good seeing.

[bird]

I guess it's not a fully illuminated disc yet, still a few months to go to opposition so it doesn't look quite as oblate as it should.

The basic difference compared to last year with the 10" and older camera is that this year I can get images 2x the size at a higher framerate in 16 bit mono compared to 8 bit mono.

If the seeing cooperates then this *should* give about a 2x improvement in overall image resolution.

regards, Bird

[Dennis]

Fantastic Jupiter image, Anthony, absolutely jaw dropping!

Cheers

Dennis

[bird]

Here's another one from a bit later, processed a bit differently, this time I also included Neat Image to cut out some of the noise and stuff.

regards, Bird

[iceman]

Holy cow, that one's even better! The detail in and around the GRS is amazing.

Awesome stuff Anthony.. I bet you'll be processing these runs for the next 2 weeks! :)

Hope you've got enough to create an animation, it would look spectacular.

[davidpretorius]

yup bird i like that much better.

i love the ripples to the right of the great red spot.

if i was to say "a tad shiny" on the first one, would that make sense?

[RB]

These are amazing Anthony, especially the second one.
Love the image scale.

:scared2:

[bird]

DP, these are still not ideal images, the seeing was good but not quite right. Also I strongly suspect that I was not collimated as best I might be, I'm still coming to grips with the new scope.

Edit: I've replaced that second image, I think the replacement is a bit of an improvement.

regards, Bird

[janoskiss]

They look fantastic, Bird. But unlike everyone else, I much prefer the first one. Less processing artefacts. The second one looks like it had something like a bumb-map applied.

[RB]

Yes it's better, it's sharper Anthony but now on my CRT I can see noise around Jupiter (sky background). The sky looks way overprocessed.

[bird]

It's had a gamma adjust done, but I didn't fix the sky...

It all comes down to how we have our monitors adjusted. The first one looks best on my lcd, but the second one looks best on my crt :-(

Bird

[matt]

Great stuff bird.

You're right about the seeing last night. One of the better nights for a few months.

Didn't have the 9.25 or webcam at home:doh:

But the viewing through the 8" f5 was very nice. Saturn was awesome through the new Pentax XW10mm and held up well with the Nagler 13mm in the 2.5x Powermate.

Was then treated to Jupiter. Amazing views of Europa transiting and emerging from the limb around 2.25am.

Will be going for avi's tonight. Hopefully post my first ever Jupiter on this forum.

[davidpretorius]

good luck matt

[bird]

Weather predictions are promising for the next few days, so go for it!

Bird

[Wombat_In_Space]

Well Anthony all I can say is WOW :eyepop: to both of them, I can't wait to see what you do when you have gotten a hang of the new scope if this is what you can do well learning to use it.

:prey2::bowdown: :prey2::bowdown:

[Hitchhiker]

Absolutely stunning, bird. I hope you get some more great seeing!

[bird]

One last image, after looking through the raw data I think this one has the best potential.

regards, Bird

[RB]

That's excellent Anthony.
It looks great on my CRT with a natural 3D look.

Thanks.

[jjjnettie]

They are extraordinary pictures!

[netwolf]

Ur imagescale is tops, and detail is excellent.

[davidpretorius]

yes that is awesome, hopefully there is an post limit per thread, otherwise i will keep coming back and telling you how good these are.

this last image has the best and most naturally soft look on my laptop screen. I really like it alot.

needless to say "world class"; mr peach would be proud of this one i believe, cos your little brothers and sisters here on IIS are!!!

[Robert_T]

Bird, it must be very satisfying to see the result of all that waiting for seeing, software development and gear upgrades, to snare the beautiful images below. As others have said the detail in and around the GRS is just amazing and the images have a hugely appealing quality just in their scale.:jawdrop:

It's nothing but cloud, rain, cloud, rain ere...

Are you stacking powermates?

[bird]

Hi guys, please indulge me for one *last* post from this set of data...

I added some more noise reduction and went a bit softer on the wavelets this time, and worked the colours a bit more carefully. This will definitely be the final image.

The left image looks the best on my lcd, the right image looks the best on my crt. Take your pick, the only difference is a bit of unsharp masking between them :-)

Robert, I'm using a 5x powermate with a short extender to get it somewhere around 6x. The effective focal length is about 10m or a shade over. The pixel size in the camera is 7.4u so my images are coming out 30% smaller than if I were using a toucam...

regards, Bird

[RB]

They are the best I've seen from you, from memory.
The right one is slightly better on my CRT.

Well done Mr Bird.

[janoskiss]

Well worth the effort, Bird! The last pair are the best. The one on the left looks best on my cheap LCD. Looks beautifully natural. You managed to bring out all the detail without leaving any hint of a "processed" look. Just stunning!

[iceman]

Absolutely stunning.

The last ones are great. I can't wait to see an animation.

[bird]

Sorry Mike, no animation this time. Of all the runs I took from 4.30am to 6am only 4 or 5 of them were good, not enough to make an animation. Jupiter is still very early, not yet transiting at dawn so the window of good seeing is very short. Maybe in a month or so I can get enough data for an animation, that would be very cool.

Bird

[ving]

:jawdrop:

great stuff anthony!!!! :)