Very rough tease - Jupiter this am

[iceman]

Hi guys.

Got up for Jupiter this morning, and managed to capture the end of a Europa shadow transit and the start of a Europa transit. The GRS came into view right at the end, but the seeing started to deteriorate.

The seeing was very good - probably the best i've seen. Pretty consistent at 8/10 and sometimes a little better. I had to double check sometimes to make sure the image was still recording, it was that still at times it was hard to see any shift between frames.

Here's a very quick and dirty process straight from the avi through registax and wavelet only process (fairly hard wavelets). I do this as a first run through the avi's to find the best avi to process.

Here's just one of the first ones, to show what i've got to go through later, processing 12 avi's :) I'll try and make an animated gif out of these too.

Thanks for looking.

[Robert_T]

Beautiful Mike, already excellent and no doubt has the makings with a bit more iceman processing magic to be an absolute pearler!:)

You got the best of the seeing over Bris-vegas this morning (at least my bit of Bris, don't know 'bout Dennis). I was up at the same time, perhaps a bit earlier and am processing now... to be frank though I'm dissappointed. Had to constantly dodge cloud and while I would have put the seeing at 7/10, in processing looking at the amount of disc edge oscillation and the relatively poor result it must have been less:mad2: more like 5-6/10 - but it all goes around and comes around so :)

cheers,

[circumpolar]

I agree.
The sky was sooo clear between 3 & 5am!
C/2006 A1 was the best i've seen to date. Tail was very visable.

[davidpretorius]

mike, that is the best detail i have seen on one of your planets. and it is about time you got the 8/10 seeing where as you say, the image does not move!!!!

cancel church, family commitments & anything else and get processing. tell your wife that house can stay in a mess and that the kids will be fine watching dvds and playing games and eating delivered pizza for the next two days. that is until you have satisfied your mates on IIS and then we will give you back!

[Dennis]

Wow again – that is an awesome image Mike. I was cosy and fast asleep in bed, so nothing from me. Look forward to seeing yours and Robert’s efforts when you’ve chugged through the avi’s.

Cheers

Dennis

[xstream]

Great avi Mike.
Can't wait to see the finished job.

[asimov]

I agree with Davo! Cancel all appointments/don't answer the door/take the phone off the hook & get crackin' with processing!

[iceman]

Thanks guys, very excited about this one.

I've run all the avi's through ppmcentre and netpbm tools, so I have my 13 lots of separate R/G/B bmp's, already cropped, centered and ready for Registax!

[asimov]

And no more replying in this thread..you haven't got time for that..chop chop! :))

[davidpretorius]

yes, old friend, us older astronomer see it all the time, the enthusiasm of the young!!!

you need patience and a calm demeanour to be successfu llike asimov and me!

NOW GET BACK BACK TO WORK AND FINISH THESE AVIS!!!!

[asimov]

Dave, Mikes too busy right now to answer/look at this thread...please call back later!

You better hurry mate! Davo is starting to spam this thread! (he-he)

[bird]

Nice work Mike - I was up and about as well, saw the last half of that transit, was very nice!

Bird

[davidpretorius]

spamming the bosses thread!

now that would be funny!!

the amount of detail through the bottom major brown band is great. i have birds up on screen and I believe Mike's will top that!!!

[asimov]

Excuse me kind sir........But we're still all here waiting for the spectacular jupiter show to start?:whistle:

You we're right...a VERY rough tease! Very rough on us planet fanatics to make us wait so long!:scared2:

[davidpretorius]

give me an "S", followed by a "P'.....

[davidpretorius]

i feel the need for a Super Planetary Aforementioned Moment.

and i haven't had it yet.....cmon mike, don't wait for work hours to post.

ppplllllllllllleeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaa ssssssssseeeeeeeeeeee?

[iceman]

Coming today.. didn't get time to do it yesterday, and I don't trust the final RGB processing on the laptop screen. Wanted to wait until it was on a CRT (today).

[matt]

Looking forward to it Mike.

Good idea about holding off the processing for the other screen.

[davidpretorius]

you are forgiven, just this once!!!

[iceman]

hmm chugging the way through these, they're turning out better than I thought. It's almost the exact same face from my Jupiter of the 18th Feb, and the increase in detail can easily be seen.

I also found that a first pass through didn't give me the results I was hoping for, so I had to troubleshoot what was going wrong. I found that by stacking less frames (only 100, instead of 350), is giving me a much sharper result.

I'm also suffering from onion rings if I push the processing too hard, which is a pain. The white level was at 185 in these captures, and gain was at 15% because transparency was so good. It could be the lack of gain causing the onion rings, not really sure.. but with only 100 frames stacked, and LR deconvolution of 7/1.2 it's keeping it at bay (mostly).

I'm now busy doing the reprocess to all 12 avi's again, so I can create an animation.. so far so good! Just very time consuming.

[davidpretorius]

any percentage 90% / 95%????



what exposure 1/25, i have been dropping back to 1/33 or 1/50 so i can up the gain??

[iceman]

I don't use the %, generally.. I just drag the slider back to where I feel the frames are starting to deteriorate. In this case (reprocess), I was more aggressive, because I knew I would only stack 100, I dragged the slider back to 300 (out of 450 original frames).

And yeh, 5fps @ 1/25s exposure. Good thought about dropping exposure to up the gain. It used to be "as low a gain as possible" - but it seems that's not the case anymore.