Believe it or not, this is the first night this year of decent seeing. I was starting to wonder if I'd get to use The Monster at all...
I have many runs to process, I think there are some which will improve on this but it might take a day or so to find them.
Seeing was about 8.5/10 most of the time with momentary improvements to about 9.5/10. The small white polar storms were visible most of the time, and that made things a lot easier as I could use them to focus on. It can be a bit of a viscious circle otherwise - if the seeing is bad then I can't find details to help focus on, so the result gets even worse. So it was nice to find a night of good seeing.
After I had finished imaging at around 6am this morning I popped in an Ep and spent some time visually observing. Ganymede was a nice small disk showing darker spots, and there was still enough good seeing about to get glimpses of lots of surface cloud detail on Jupiter.
This image is the original size, here are the details:
Scope: 13.1" f/5.5 newtonian on a G-11 mount
Camera: PGR firewire Dragonfly Express
640x480 @ 30fps, 16bpp monochrome data
Separate RGB channels, 30 seconds per channel
Registax, Astra Image, GIMP.
Awesome pic Anthony. That's huge image scale! No resampling in that one? It doesn't look as oblate as it should.. or is it just because it's upside down?
I guess it's not a fully illuminated disc yet, still a few months to go to opposition so it doesn't look quite as oblate as it should.
The basic difference compared to last year with the 10" and older camera is that this year I can get images 2x the size at a higher framerate in 16 bit mono compared to 8 bit mono.
If the seeing cooperates then this *should* give about a 2x improvement in overall image resolution.
DP, these are still not ideal images, the seeing was good but not quite right. Also I strongly suspect that I was not collimated as best I might be, I'm still coming to grips with the new scope.
Edit: I've replaced that second image, I think the replacement is a bit of an improvement.
They look fantastic, Bird. But unlike everyone else, I much prefer the first one. Less processing artefacts. The second one looks like it had something like a bumb-map applied.
You're right about the seeing last night. One of the better nights for a few months.
Didn't have the 9.25 or webcam at home
But the viewing through the 8" f5 was very nice. Saturn was awesome through the new Pentax XW10mm and held up well with the Nagler 13mm in the 2.5x Powermate.
Was then treated to Jupiter. Amazing views of Europa transiting and emerging from the limb around 2.25am.
Will be going for avi's tonight. Hopefully post my first ever Jupiter on this forum.
Well Anthony all I can say is WOW to both of them, I can't wait to see what you do when you have gotten a hang of the new scope if this is what you can do well learning to use it.
