[Hitchhiker]

Have had a couple of breakthroughs lately with my planetary imaging. With a little bit of good seeing tonight, here are my best Jupiter's yet.

First breakthrough was finding the right settings in Envisage to eliminate onion rings. Up until a couple of nights ago, all my Jupiter images (and my Saturn ones, for that matter) have had a bad case of the onion rings which meant I could not 'push' the processing very far. There are some advanced settings in Envisage that allow you to increase the gamma. With this done, the onion rings are gone!

Second breakthrough is a DIY SCT cooler. I used this tonight for the first time. Had it in for about two hours before observing. Having a nicely cooled scope leads me on to the third breakthrough.....

Collimation. Because my scope has never really been cooled down properly before, collimation has been very difficult. Tube currents have made the out of focus rings very 'shaky' and difficult to see properly and, though I have been pretty close, I have not been able to 'critically' collimate my SCT before tonight. I was able to use my 6mm eyepiece to collimate on Zubenelgenubi and was rewarded with the best views I've had of Jupiter. I think I still have a little way to go with collimation, but having a cooled scope is going to help.

Seeing tonight was about 5-6, possibly going to 7 at times. All images were taken at 0.25 sec exposure, 100% gain, offset of 55, gamma was 1000 (as per the setting in Envisage), saturation was bumped up to 1450 from a default setting of 1300. Images were captured in Envisage as BMPs. Each run was 3 minutes.

The first run was started at 20:50, the second at 20:56, the third at 21:19, and the last one at 21:26.

Processing was done in Registax - nothing fancy, just a straight stack and wavelets. Now that I have some decent data I can try some other techniques such as RGB splitting and deconvolution.