[ralph1]

Just finished a very late image of jupiter and its moons. It would have been done 2 weeks ago but when GIMP was brought to my attention I reprocessed it from the start and it turned out much better. The original image was taken on the 19th december, fairly good seeing, good transparency, same equipment and programs as usual. The telescope wasn't perfectly collimated at the time which manifested itself in elongation of the moons and there are some artefacts from the stacking. The data looked reasonably good when I took it so I am somewhat disappointed but it's significantly better than my last jupiter image. As usual, jupiter appeared disappointing through the eyepiece. Mars low to the horizon with a 6'' disk consistently showed more detail than jupiters 45'' disk, in a variety of seeing conditions.
Ralph