Hello,
I have created an animated gif showing 5 hours rotation of Jupiter, revealing a complete traverse of the GRS across the visible disc.
Here is a link to the animation, hosted by Mike Salway at Ice In Space (Warning: 2.6Mb file size):
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/downloa...RS-Rotaton.gif
Details:
Over the evening of 14/15th April 2006, from Brisbane, QLD, Australia, I managed to grab a stack of 132 avi’s, spanning the period 22:29pm to 03:30am AEST (GMT+10) showing a complete traverse of the GRS across the visible disc of Jupiter. The animated gif is from an avi made up of 132 bmp’s, the output from processing the 132 avi’s in Registax. The avi’s were captured using the video capture timer in K3CCDTools.
Regions of interest:
South is at the top, North at the bottom. I think that the animation shows the differential rotation of the various systems of Jupiter. The darkening of the leading edge of the GRS as it peeks out from the limb of Jupiter is also quite interesting. It is really neat watching the white ovals progressing in the South Temperate Regions, as well as following the small dark spot chasing the white spot and catching it in the North Temperate Regions. Mike’s previous animation, which appeared on SpaceWeather for March 15, has these two objects of interest with quite a separation between them.
Capture:
There was a minor complication due to a meridian flip required at around 01:12am due to using a GEM to carry the C9.25 optical tube. Avi capture started when Jupiter was 49 degrees above the E horizon and ceased due to poor seeing and cloud interruptions when Jupiter was 55 degrees above the W horizon. Jupiter transited at 01:14 AEST (GMT+10)
The animated gif is 2.6Mb in size, 10fps. The seeing was good but gradually deteriorated over the session, with some images being affected by bands of (terrestrial) clouds passing during the avi capture. There are a couple of gaps where Jupiter completely disappeared behind clouds. There was a 15 day old waning gibbous Moon some 11 degrees from Jupiter during the session.
Equipment:
Celestron C9.25, Televue x2.5 Powermate
Philips ToUcam 840K
Takahashi EM200 Temma2 German Equatorial Mount (GEM)
Capture software:
K3CCDTools, 10fps, 1/25 sec, 90 sec captures at 2 minute intervals.
Brightness 50%
Gamma 00
Gain 20%
Processing software:
Avi’s processed in Registax – output as bmp’s.
Bmp’s after 01:12am were batch processed in Corel PhotoPaint 12 to rotate them 180 degrees to account for the meridian flip.
BMP’s were auto planetary aligned and cropped to 320 x 240 in ImagesPlus.
All 132 bmp’s were then animated as an avi in K3CCDTools.
The final avi was then converted to an animated gif in “Advanced Gif Animator”.
Capturing and processing such a mountain of avi’s was truly a marathon effort, greatly eased by the excellent equipment, assisted by amazing software products by a bunch of talented designers and authors who have produced such wonderful applications for today’s amateur astronomer.
My thanks go to Mike Salway from Ice In Space for hosting this animation.
Cheers
Dennis
![[1ponders]'s Avatar](../vbiis/customavatars/avatar45_9.gif){kind=avatar}
)....brilliant result after much hard work.
