[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all.

After a long time processing, I present some images of Jupiter.

These were taken on the morning of the 18th February, in seeing that fluctuated from average (6/10) to great (8/10).

I was lucky enough to get a Europa transit and a rising GRS, and I also made a point of directly imaging Ganymede and Io. They can be seen separately in another thread I started this morning, but they are here as well in context - in a composite image with the shot of Jupiter. The scale and size are as captured and observed.

I played with a few different settings, mainly gamma. The image with 0 gamma (the one with Ganymede and Io) looked best while capturing and after registax-only processing, but I believe the others (captured at 50%) capture more data at the edge. However the gamma needs to be reduced during post-processing, else it leaves it with a white-washed look.

They were all captured @ 5fps, with the 5x powermate and the Toucam (pulled a little way out). Processing was the usual routine.. and it took ages (I had 13 avi's in total).

In the montage of 4 images, the top 2 were in 6-7/10 seeing, while the lower 2 were in 8/10 seeing.

I'm really happy with these images, I believe they're my best of Jupiter thanks to the best seeing I've had this year. I tried chasing him into daylight to get more of the GRS (as Robert said, just one more avi!), but the seeing deteriorated again after the 5:42am image.

Comments welcome!