Unfortunate that I have to post after Bird's fantastic shot, but oh well
Had a great morning imaging Jupiter, GRS transitting, and at 3:30am when I got up, Europa and it's shadow were on the disc too. I got a few avi's with the shadow visible, however my image scale just isn't large enough to see Europa itself. It's probably just 1 of the lighter coloured pixels
I had about 70 separate avi's, grouped into bunches of 3 or avi's with slightly different capture settings in each, trying to find the optimal for my setup. Each 'group' of avi's lasts about 60 seconds or so (around 8-13 seconds per avi).
I've just used Virtual Dub to join them together and save them as bmp's, and used Bird's ppmcentre program to centre them all within the frame.
I didn't delete the bad frames from Virtual Dub, the seeing was quite good and it was difficult to find the bad frames, plus I didn't have the patience.
The first few avi's were taken at 15fps, but then I remembered that when seeing was good, use a lower FPS, so I used 5fps. What I noticed immediately, is that at 15fps I could use 1/25s shutter and the image wasn't overexposed, but at 5fps I couldn't use any less than 1/50s shutter otherwise it was too washed out. I guess that goes to show how much compression it does at 15fps.
I tried imaging at 1/50s and 1/100s mainly, to try and freeze the image before the earths rotation blurred it as it zipped across my preview screen. I tried various gamma settings, and found the best result during my very last capture, and that was with no gamma. The colours were much more natural. Wish I'd tried zero gamma earlier, as it was clear right away that it looked better
The last few avi's were taken with the 2x barlow pulled out of the barrel a way, and the ToUcam pulled out of the barlow a little way. This gave me a slightly longer focal length and therefore a slightly larger image. Not much, but i'll take all the scale I can get
These images were also taken with my new ES IR filter, my first images taken with the filter. I'm yet to do with/without IR filter comparison, i'll do that next time out.
Details:
- 10" dob no tracking @ 2500mm FL (f/10 with 2x barlow)
- ToUcam, taken at 5fps
- Approx 90 frames out of ~200 stacked
- The images on the left are raw out of registax, the images on the right are processed in AstraImage (split/LR deconvolution/recombine RGB)
Comments, suggestions are welcome.
These are my best Jupiter to date, got some detail in and around the GRS, the top shot shows Europa's shadow. Europa is on the disc somewhere in all 4 images below, good luck finding it