Jupiter Jan 8th Oval BA

[Quark (Trevor)]

Imaged Jupiter this morning in good seeing, have rather nice depth of detail of Oval BA and surrounding region. I would normally have posted my animations here but on this occasion I could not get the file sizes below 200Kb so I have attached a link to them over on Cloudy Nights.
http://www.cloudynights.com/topic/523944-jupiter-january-7th-2016/

Regards
Trevor

[ags_ (Phil)]

Great images Trevor, it looks like it's going to be a superb year for planets.

Regards, Phil

[Quark (Trevor)]

Thanks Phil, very encouraging to get good seeing so early in the year, next Wednesday is also looking great currently.

[John K]

nice work Trev - heaps of detail there!

[icytailmark (Mark)]

great work as always trevor. Do you still use the ZWO ASI120MM camera?

[Quark (Trevor)]

Thanks John and Mark.


Mark, no, back in November I purchased a PGR Grasshopper 3 the details are on the banner across the bottom of my images.
I am not in the position to be able to change cameras each year and had stuck with the ASI120MM-S for several years rather than updating to the 174 when it was released.
I had been watching closely developments Sony were making with their CMOS sensors and the IMX 252 looked great, a quantum leap over the ASI120MM-S and considerably better than the 174. So I waited until someone produced a camera with the 252 sensor and PGR were the first to do so.
That said, looking back through my archived data the best data I have ever captured has happened to be with PGR cameras, of course any camera will produce great images in near perfect seeing.
The Hopper is very sensitive and produces significantly less read noise than anything that has preceded it. It is USB 3.0 although I am very happily running it on USB 2.0 (a long story).
For planetary imaging I believe this camera to be the current state of the art although it is not cheap and to run on USB 3.0 probably needs a specific PCIe card which can be sourced from PGR (Note Phil sourced a card locally that had the required chipset in it). For planetary imaging I am running ROI at 640 x 600 and can achieve the frame rate I require without any problems on USB 2.0. Note, I use a high spec quad core desktop although it also runs on my Toshiba quad core Qosmio laptop and even on an older Toshiba core 2 duo laptop although on the latter I am back to 640 x 480 ROI and would only use it if both other computers died.