Jupiter with GRS! 19/01/2005

[iceman (Mike)]

Hey guys..

All my images of Jupiter to-date had no GRS, so I planned my next imaging session around when the GRS would be visible, and that was at 4:30am this morning. It was nice that the clouds didn't spoil the fun.. in fact it was a beautiful morning and the seeing was exceptional. Barely any noticeable swimming of the image.

Again I wished I could see Saturn, but by that time it was behind some awful trees

I got my Jupiter avi's though, experimented with some 5fps, 10fps and 15fps captures.. spent a lot of this morning processing the avi's and trying some different tweaks in registax.

I did something different this time though, once I combined the avi's in VirtualDub and deleted the bad frames, I saved them the video as an image sequence (of bmp's) and used Bird's (thanks Bird!) cool program which centre's the planet in each bmp.

Then, once opened in registax, everything is in the centre so there's no tracking misalignments or warnings and the whole process goes heaps faster from then on.

One thing I did find this morning - my CCD chip needs a bath.. dust donuts all over it. I deleted about 1/3 of my frames due to having big dusticles on the planet, and i'm sure the rest of the frames suffered a bit too. I used the can'o'air at work today to hopefully clean it - will check it tonight.

Details:
- 10" dob, no tracking, f/10 (2500mm FL with 2x barlow)
- Elevation: 50-55degrees
- Most images are approx 150-250 frames stacked out of 400-500.
- Seeing: Very good
- There's a GRS!

Appreciate comments, advice, suggestions, best image



I think the ones above are my best Jupiter to-date (my 3rd time imaging jupiter), here's my other 2 attempts for comparison:

11th January:


13th January:


If anyone wants to play around with my raw video and see if you can bring anything more out, here's a link to a 7meg zipped up version. It uncompresses to 350meg and has a few hundred frames.

Jupiter-20050119

Thanks for looking.

[Comet Hunter]

Nice shot's Ice, you've come along way

What/where is this centreing program of Bird's? Is it freely available? I have 2 hours worth of Jupiter I'm trying to make a movie with but am struggling with re-aligning the different avi's. Sounds like Bird's program would solve my issues.

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks CH.. Bird privately sent me his program, i'll let him chip in and decide if he wants to make it available.

Also beware though, that you can only have individual movies of Jupiter (to align/stack) that last around 2 minutes, due to the rotation speed of the planet. Any longer than that and the features will have moved and will blur in the final result.

[gbeal]

NIce one Mike, they are looking better all the time, keep at it.
Gary

[Comet Hunter]

Yep, no worries Ice.

Each avi is only 1min long, taken every 5mins....so about 24 avi's in total, however had a bit of cloud roll in part way through >:[

[iceman (Mike)]

But are you going to combine it into one long 24 minute avi?

[rumples riot]

Nice shot, your powers of patience are amazing. Much more improved from last time. A little bit of blurring but at least now you can see the features, you must be really chuffed. And remember of course this is done without a tracking mount. Good on you.

I was out at the same time and two things were against me. First seeing was 2/10 and second was the dust donuts in my LPI. I cannot open the LPI without causing some damage so I went and bought a Toucam pro 11 from the same guy you got yours from Mike. I drove down to his house and picked it up with the adapter and IR filter. Are you still using the IR filter and what are your settings. I notice that K3ccdtools has all the options for it and would like a helping hand. I have looked at some links and got a bit of a clue, but this is another area yet to learn about.

Well done on the shots.

[Comet Hunter]

No, I've already processed the individual avi's into images, I'm trying to align the images and use those to make a avi, I understand registax3 can now de-rotate, stack and save as avi (which is what I'm after) but I cant seem to get it to align them correctly...I've managed to align and stack the frames in V2 but it doesn't save as avi's. So thought maybe Birds program would align all the images for me and make it easier for registax3 to align them...

V3 gives me this (this is a sample of 4 images - I have about 12 or so I'm trying to use)...
http://comethunter.com/images/sample3.jpg

resulting avi from registax3 is here (960K)...

http://comethunter.com/images/sample.avi

If I could get them to stack properly I think I'd have what I'm trying to do.

[ving (David)]

woah!
purdy stuff!
dobs pwnz!

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Nice one Ice. Definately your best todate. I can't wait for Jupiter to clear the trees enough to get a shot at it.

Andrew have you though about opening each bmp in a photoeditting prog and cropping them to try to center them?

And speaking of K3ccdtools (thanks Paul for that opening ) Mike I can't get K3 to recognize ToUcam. It does the LPI. Did you have to do anything specieal? And when I open avis done with ToUcam K3 sees them all as dropped frames. Any ideas?

[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

Nice shot Mike - feel free to share that program around, it's nothing special.

When I get some time I'll make a web page for it with some actual instructions :-)

cheers, Bird

[rumples riot]

Paul go into video capture and go right to the bottom of tab and select Microsoft WDM image capture. This will tell the program what device you have and it will recognise the Toucam.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Got it. Thanks Paul

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

It worked eventually.

Thanks. I did what you suggested and still couldn't get anything. Then checked the vidio source to see if the options box would come up and it did. I thought what's going on here there is no preview on the screen . Then I checked the camera. Black lense cap on. Do'h

[Comet Hunter]

Originally posted by [1ponders]
....

Andrew have you though about opening each bmp in a photoeditting prog and cropping them to try to center them?

....

Yeah, I've had a bit of a play around in GIMP and a few other processing/aligning tools trying to align each image but had a few difficulties getting them to readily do what I'm after (a little over head for the level I'm at currently) - lookin for a more point and click solution at the moment if ones available, I'll keep pluggin away with GIMP though.

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Bird, i'll put your program in the Files section on IceInSpace.. i'll do it today with any luck. CH you'll then be able to use it no probs.

Paul, if you're getting a lot of dropped frames, make sure you're using no more than 10 or 15fps to capture, otherwise you'll get dropped frames from clogging up the USB 1.0 interface with too much data.

[iceman (Mike)]

CH, see the tips forum for downloading Bird's program.

[Comet Hunter]

Yep, already found it in the files section, been checkin every now and again since you mentioned you'd maybe upload it today

It's helped somewhat, managed to get 4 or 5 decent frames aligned but not enough to get a worth while movie.

Seems Registax3 doesn't like stacking images, I've tried both BMP and jpg formats and with only two frames bascially on top of each other and it still wouldn't align them >:[. Registax2 works great, just doesn't de-rotate the images or save as avi (which v3 is suppose to I believe)...you can see the path of the moon off to the left ....

http://comethunter.com/images/samplefull.jpg

- just need to save those frames as an avi instead of stacked jpg's and I'd be done.

[iceman (Mike)]

VirtualDub will enable you to create an avi from a set of jpeg/bmp's.

[Comet Hunter]

yeah, thats what I used to create the small 4 frame avi I've managed to get so far. I still have another 5 or 6 images that dont want to play nicely and align with the rest (even with Birds centreing program)...I'm sloooowly getting there though.