Jupiter..the movie..and your comments please

[Doodles23 (Dave Bleser)]

I have posted the red channel movie on YouTube taken with my CGE 1400 in Miami on 0328 UT Aug 12th. The frame rate is 60 fps on the DMK21AF04. The altitude is about 40 degrees here in Miami, FL.
If this was your image on your CCD how would you rate the seeing?
I want to judge my seeing the same way everyone else does on this forum.
And I would like to see someone else's movie that they consider excellent seeing someday.

see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=147B0lm4HEU

[iceman (Mike)]

Probably around 7-ish I guess. Hard to judge sometimes until you process it up - because many times I've been caught by premature estimation of the seeing.

Sometimes it looks good in the live feed but doesn't process up nearly as well as you'd hoped when you considered the seeing.

[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi Dave,

Nice avi.

Just wondering if you have active cooling.
There seems to be be a fair amount of rippling across the image, this may well be due to air currents in the boundary layer of air across the face of your primary mirror.

I suppose when comparing raw avi data the image scale is crucial in the comparison. If the image scale was greater then this ripple would also be magnified.

I would rate the seeing, based on this avi, at about 6, however this topic tends to be very subjective.

I was going to upload a red channel avi from Aug 12th taken in seeing that I rated as good 7 to better than 7. However it is 357 MB so even the IIS FTP site is not really an option. It has a considerably larger image scale and there is no ripple at all, however the image quality does vary slightly.

I have posted the images produced from it on this forum and also an animation of RGB images taken with good seeing.

It really is quite surprising how little processing is required when the data is good. With Jupiter I think the determining factor regarding the seeing, is how well resolved the very small ovals in both polar regions are. In less than good seeing these tiny features are lost.

Regards
Trevor

[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

Dave, the seeing looks pretty good to me, there is some slow seeing going on there which may be tube current or mirror currents as Trevor suggests, or it may just be external seeing - can't really tell. The small scale detail looks very stable so I'd hope this would process quite nicely.

cheers, Bird

[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

ps here is a video I uploaded a couple of months ago showing Jupiter in good seeing from my place. Youtube seems to have downgraded the video quality a bit, but you'll get the idea. The video is 3 minutes - 1 minute of red,1 minute of green, and 1 minute of blue. Recorded at about 50fps.

The lateral motion is the scope moving around in the slight breeze, Jupiter itself was not moving at all.

If you can afford the bandwidth, hit the HQ mode link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC77uNY8Cfo

cheers, Bird

[Zac Pujic]

The seeing looks reasonable. Probably 7/10

Zac

[Doodles23 (Dave Bleser)]

Thanks for showing me my problem. What you are saying is that the rippling is not due to seeing but to local currents. And now I am forced to agree. There is no active cooling in the C14 tube but I let it equillibrate for hours.. (our tube needs to warmed, not cooled!) but I am shooting from a concrete pad over my roof about 2 hrs after a 90 degree day. I'm only about 30 ft from the roof and Jupiter is about 25 degrees above the roof. Not much I can do other than blow up my house. You know what? I'm thinking of hosing down the roof before I observe. Desperate people do desperate things. When I get home I will be anxious check out your .avi file. I just compress mine for upload as you cannot upload the uncompressed movie. In fact this was a quicktime movie converted to an .avi and uploaded to YouTube. I'm bringing the C14 to the dark Florida Keys next month in an effort to address the problem. This year Jupiter gets no higher than 49 degrees in Miami. Not so in Australia obviously, as I saw that Jupiter can get as high as 80 degrees this year for Australians. It will be several more years before Jupiter can get that high for us. It also doesn't help that in Miami in the summer you get only 2-3 nights a month where the sky is clear enough around midnight for planetary photography. But I will keep trying. It could be worse. I could be living in New York State where I was born and Jupiter never gets above 28 degrees this year.