JUPITER plus IO shadow transit - 10th Mar 06

[Robert_T]

Hi All, I picked up where Mike left off by the looks. My first glimpse of sky by leaving scope out and getting up 3.45am after stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the complete cloud cover that was there when I went to bed. Transparency and dew was a bit of a problem. Seeing was variable as Mike experienced. Looks like a patch of Jetstream over Brisbane, but as Jupiter is at the zenith whenever it calmed for a sec the seeing jumped to 7-8/10, unfortunately for only a small proportion of the time.

Anyway, took reams of avis to sate my recent deprivation, but am a little dissapointed at the result. The sequence below is a little rough and ready, I think if I want to get the best out of these I'm gonna have to work harder and do some virtual dubbing and perhaps processing in separate colour channels. Still it's all good fun Right

All these were taken with the C9.25 on the LXD75 mount.

cheers,

[robin]

They're great shots mate.Love the one 2nd from right.You/ve captured the moon as a minute disk very well.

[acropolite (Phil)]

Very nice Robert, nothing to be disappointed in there, I'd be interested to see the ToUcam results with the same setup, same night, given that they are supposed to be identical.

[davidpretorius]

i know where you are coming from. you set a std for yourself and then it is really really hard to go thru the motions and post it if the seeing is not up to the "best".

still very good images, as we discussed, it would be great to see where this usb2.0 camera from artemis is in a few months once beta testing finishes

[Dennis]

Great set of images Robert, glad to see your perseverance has paid off, well worth the effort. Disappointment – nah, kick it out of the door; you don’t need its company in the house with those fine images.

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

I reckon they're great, Robert! Heaps of detail, just a little burnt out in the core. I'd love to see you reduce the gamma to 0.8 or 0.7 in astraimage on the final combined result. I reduce mine to 0.6 after capturing with 50% gamma. The last 2 also look like they could use a little shift in the X axis with your red/blue.

The onion rings you're describing in the other thread, do you mean the right edge of the far left image? In my experience, that's not onion rings.. that's over-sharpening, like getting an "encke division" on a Saturn image from over-sharpening. I find it happens on my images if I'm too aggressive with the LR deconvolution.

Here's 2 examples of what I mean by the gamma - I used your far left image and your far right image, and took them into photoshop. I used the circle marquee tool to select the middle 80% of the image (with a 35px feather), and I used a new curves layer to reduce the exposure in the middle. You can achieve the same effect in AstraImage as I described above by reducing the gamma after recombining.

Hope you don't mind me playing. Great images!

[asimov (John)]

Brilliant Robert..

Thats the way to do it! Once the weather gods realize your not going to take no for an answer, come clouds/rain/earthquakes...they'll go a bit easier on you, lol.

Well done on being available for the break in the cloud & taking advantage of it & the images, their great.

[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

Nice images Robert!

Bird

[Robert_T]

Thanks Guys

Mike - I dropped the Gamma to 0.7 and repost here. Does seem to improve it a little.

chers,

[iceman (Mike)]

Much better!