Newcomer. Jupiter animation from France

[acanicio (Axel)]

Hello,

My name is Axel Canicio. I live in La Grand Combe, a little town in southern France.

I was lucky this last week-end to have the best seeing and stability conditions I've ever had for over ten years in my region. I decided to dust off the telescope and do some serious imaging.

The result is an animation of 4 hours worth of Jupiter's rotation.

The data is the following :
Location : Barjac, Southern France 44°5'N, 04°19'E.
Instrument : C11 @F10 with Barlow 2X.
Skywatcher Synscan EQ6 mount
Camera : The Imaging Source DBK 41AG02.AS
Software : Astrosnap Pro V2.3Alpha
Capture time : From 00h25 until 04h20 (GMT+1)
The video contains 1183 frames.
Each frame is the result of a loop integration of 200 frames. The software integrates (adds) 200 frames into a "sliding" buffer. When the buffer is full, each incoming frame kicks out the oldest frame in the stack.
Every 10 seconds I extract the composited frame and save it to a 48bit tiff file.
At the end of the capture session, I process all the frames with Photoshop using a script, and re-feed the resulting images to Astrosnap Pro.
Then the program does another loop integration with a buffer of 18 frames, processes them further with a wavelet filter, and finally stores the result in an AVI file.

This is only one of the frames of the video :

http://www.astrosnap.com/Gallery/Jup...el-Canicio.jpg


Here is the link to the full size video animation (1183 frames, DivX6 codec duration : 39 seconds, size : 3.8Mb).


I also made an animated GIF, the size is reduced to 50%, and contains only 230 frames. (It would have been too large if I had kept its original size) :
http://www.astrosnap.com/Gallery/Juju-100912-anim.gif

I hope I'll have some more nights like this !!

I see that some of you use a software called "winjupos", that can "paste" a map of jupiter on a rotating sphere.
This IS NOT done with winjupos or any similar software.
It is a real captured and processed series of frames !!.


Best regards.
Axel Canicio

[DavidU (Dave)]

A very smooth AVI Axel. Thank you for sharing.

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi Axel, to IceInSpace!

That's a nice image and a very fine animation. Certainly a lot of work has gone into capturing and processing that many frames!

Well done!

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

That is beautiful animation, I really love to see the different layers moving at different speeds which is so clear to see. Wonderful job.

[multiweb (Marc)]

Great stuff. Loved the video.

[Quark (Trevor)]

Greetings Axel and welcome,

What a most impressive animation, loved it.
A super job indeed.

Regards
Trevor

[h0ughy (David)]

love the animation

[John Hothersall]

That is an especially smooth animation which gives an idea of the different layers motion against one another, dynamics are extremely well demonstrated so well done - it certainly was a good night!

John.

[Scorpius51 (John)]

Welcome and very well done Axel!

Cheers
John

[Matt Wastell (Matt)]

Great job!

[Clayton]

Lovely smooth animation.
Lot's of work in this.
Thanks for the effort and great result Axel

[acanicio (Axel)]

Hello everybody,

First of all, thank you all very much for your encouragements on this animation !!

Unlike what you imagine, to be honest with you, making this animation was NOT really a lot of work.

A couple of years ago, when I saw that it usually takes someone hours or days to make a planetary animation, tens of gigabytes of hard disk space to store all these avi files needed and obtain only a couple of frames, I thought that there ought to be another way to do things...

I use a new method that simplifies things a lot, as most of the work is done in real time by a software, when capturing the frames. The frames are selected, aligned and stacked litterally "on the fly" in a "rolling" stack, resulting in preprocessed frames that are saved on disk every 10 seconds in 48 bit tiff format.

I then just try a couple of filter settings on what it looks like "the best" resulting frame, and use these settings in an automated script in photoshop. The software then loops on the frames applying the filter to all of them.
At the end, I just need to concatenate all the frames in an AVI file, and the job is done.


Cheers
Axel

[michaellxv (Michael)]

Excellent animation. Shows the dynamics of the planet well.