[Quark (Trevor)]

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Looove to observe from a sub arc sec seeing site...can only imagine what the views would be like

Hmm? So... are you saying world's best planetary images can be created from less than perfect raw data and they can surpass in quality images created using essentially perfect data?

Mike

Yes Mike, I would love to have my observatory beamed to a spot adjacent to the Keck’s. Not too sure, physically, how my old body would cope with the extended time at altitude, suppose I could get in a good supply of oxygen bottles.
To the second part of your question. To start with I thought the following link on “The Lucky Imaging Technique” might be of interest. There are many papers on this subject available on the net.
http://rsaa.anu.edu.au/study/potential-projects/lucky-imaging-and-adaptive-optics-satellite-imaging

The point I would underline from this paper is contained in the first paragraph of the paper “lucky imaging can produce high quality images of celestial objects without an adaptive optic system.” I maintain that there are locations, not at altitude, where occasionally the atmospheric conditions allow for extremely hi-res RGB planetary imaging, using “The Lucky Imaging Technique”. Damian Peach has repeatedly produced stunning work from his trips to Barbados and Bird produced a knock your sox’s off Jupiter from Exmouth and I have not yet seen better. Now that’s a personal judgment.
We need to compare apples with apples. In the case of the somewhat controversial comparison of Birds most excellent Jupiter from Exmouth (Aug 30th 2010 17:49 UTC) with similar data around that time produced with the 1m scope at Pic du Midi. In that case both images were visible light RGB.
Clearly, the major Earth based telescopes spend very little time imaging the planets; obviously when doing so using way different equipment and techniques. Fortunately we are in the middle of a big wet in the outback at the moment so I have some time to kill. Have been working my way through the major observatories looking at planetary data. I have attached links to examples of their work from their galleries. Have not yet found RGB data as they tend to take full advantage of their aperture and use near to mid IR, methane etc, there are examples that have been colorized to some extent.
Starting with my all time favourite Saturn data from the ESO’s VLT website.
http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1116a/

Jupiter & Saturn from Subaru.
http://subarutelescope.org/Pressrelease/1999/01/28c/JupiterSaturn_300.jpg
Jupiter from Keck. Also check out the 1998 Saturn from the same page.
http://www.keckobservatory.org/gallery#prettyPhoto[pp_gal]/57/
There is a smorgasbord of images from NASA’s IRTF. Have not included the link as it takes up about half a page but I am sure you could google it as I did.

And finally The Gran Telescopio Canarias. Couldn’t find any planetary stuff but thought you would appreciate the deepsky work. This is now the largest optical scope on Earth at 10.4m.
http://www.gtc.iac.es/multimedia/imageGallery.php
Moving on, have attached a link back to Birds original post on IIS, the first image he posted in this thread was from Aug 30th 2010 17:38.5 UTC. Later in this thread, page 3, he posted a better RGB from Aug 30th 2010 17:49 UTC along with the individual R, G & B channels.
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=65304&page=3
Due to the limitation of the file size I cannot post the Pic du Midi RGB images, however you can access them from PVOL.
http://www.pvol.ehu.es/pvol/index.jsp?action=iopw
The RGB that I initially used as a comparison to Bird’s is the only RGB I could find from Pic du Midi for August 2010;
J2010-08-07_02-55_rgb_pic.jpg
To be fair I searched further and found a better Pic du Midi RGB from September 2010.
J2010-09-29_20-59_rgb_pic.jpg
The Pic du Midi RGB images really do make for an interesting comparison with Bird’s from Exmouth.
Regards
Trevor