[iceman (Mike)]

Hi guys.

Hadn't done any imaging since the 23rd/Jan so I was anxious to get some ToUcam time in.

I cleaned my ToUcam chip at Lostock, and this morning was the first time I'd used it since.. well I made it worse of course. The spots I had are gone, but they're replaced with new ones in worse spots that are harder to avoid. Back to the distilled water tonight.

When I got up at 3:45am there were clouds around, but Jupiter was still in a large sucker hole, so I got the laptop out.. seeing looked ok through the eyepiece, started to set up and then the clouds came. 5 minutes later a sucker hole opened up, but I had to rely on a very quick judge of focus so I could capture an avi before the clouds closed in again.

Got 1 avi, clouded in. 1 more sucker hole, got half an avi then clouds for the rest of the morning. So not much to show for the effort, but here's the image from the first avi.

The lack of time spent on focusing is apparent in this image, it's a little soft and the seeing was 6/10 at best so the results aren't the best.

Anyway here it is for your consumption.

While waiting after the clouds came in, I loaded the 900nc firmware mod on my ToUcam - so next time out i'll be trying it. This shot is with the normal 840 drivers.

Capture details:
- 10fps for 90 seconds
- Gain 40% (approx). Gamma 25% (approx). 1/25s exposure

Processing details:
- ppmcentre, Split into rgb, stacked and processed in registax, recombined and processed in AstraImage.