Jupiter in good seeing! + animation!

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all.

Seeing started off average last night, but as I was capturing it improved with each new avi until it was really good!

I captured 17 avi's in total, and used the last 11 to make an animation. The first 6 were just poor quality and it was no point adding them in. The last few frames of the animation are the best, when the seeing was great.

You can download the animation here:

Jupiter Animation - approx 500k gif

And attached below are the 4 best frames of the night.

I captured at 5fps, 1/33s with gain 45%. Interestingly, for a lot of the avi's, I went "out of bounds" and captured for 110 seconds instead of the normal 90. I figured that because my image scale isn't very big, we shouldn't see rotation in that time. Judging by the results, it looks ok to me!

Processed in the normal way. To save time this morning, I was actually saving bmp's from VirtualDub from one avi while I was capturing the next avi! Then, before I went to bed, I kicked off a shell script which went through all 17 bmp directory, and ran ppmcentre and split into R/G/B bmp's. When I woke up, it was all complete.

So this morning, all I had to do was load the bmp's into registax and go from there.

Comments welcome.

[Dennis]

OMG - that is stunning! The huge image scale and the smooth processing and frame transitions are simply outstanding. Red Jnr sticks out like a sore thumb! Great work Mike, you must be very pleased with the results.

Thanks for punching these out so quickly too.

Cheers

Dennis

[h0ughy (David)]

Very Ordinary Mike, I am sure you can do better.

(ok I had to balance Dennis's comment, it truely is a OMG)

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks Dennis and h0ughy. Yes, I'm very pleased with these, especially since it's my first decent night of seeing in so long.

Here's a 1.5x resampled version.

[ving (David)]

the seeing last night around 10pm was the best i've seen for such a long time. I'd say about 8/10 at the peak and it was ofter at the peak
I was looking at jupiter and it was looking at it for the first time ever. banding, grs, grs jr, everything

great image mike

[Robert_T]

Truly magical, sublime ... I'm insanely jealous. Those are about the best balance of detail, colour and natural feel that I've ever seen for Joop. Love 'em.

More importantly, when are you going to package up all that processing automation for us IT challenged suckers ... waking up and the processing fairies have been... PRICELESS!

[Volans]

Amazing Mike!! I do like seeing the differential rotation between the bands and zones. I'd love to have the ability to show these animations to the school groups (alas, we don't have the right technology in our dome) and then to emphasise to the kids...this was done by an amateur!!

Peter.

[John K]

holy cow Mike, that's amazing. Looks better than the Voyager movies!

[Rodstar (Rod)]

Nice work again Mike. You've licked Jupiter, alright.

What's the next challenge? I am wondering if you could cast your imaging to the moon, and capture an interesting sequence?? You might need to take some images each night at the same time, to see the transition between moon phases.

[Lester]

Top stuff Mike,

I would say the quality of imaging is going up and up. I guess when you get 10/10 conditions you will capture even more detail.

I cannot see how you could improve on these images, the colours are fantastic.

[beren]

Congrats fine work indeed

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

Just superb, Mike. Well done!