The seeing last night was very good for a while, here is an image showing the Oval BA region. Note the large orange spot in the northern polar region (top).
I always look forward, with quite some anticipation, when I see a new post of yours on the forum.
When I look around here and other astro sites such as ALPO, PVOL & the B.A.A I see a fair variety in the standard of imaging by amateurs from around the world. There are some very good planetary imagers out there and their work is very good.
"Very good", is never the sort of comment that could be applied to the majority of your work. I think you really have gone to another level.
The images you are now producing would seem to range between, " Most Excellent, Bloody Brilliant and Outright Stunning".
I think when you fire up your 16", NASA may retire the Hubble.
Trevor, I can't stress the importance of good seeing... without good raw data there's no chance to produce these sort of images.
But much better images are possible even with this raw data... at the moment we limit ourselves to 3 minutes or less of data on Jupiter because of it's rotation, this is only a problem because we're stacking images onto a 2D surface. If there were a stacking program that let you capture (say) an hour of data and stacked it onto a 3D model of Jupiter, with each frame in the right place, then a huge improvement would be made. I keep talking about this, and maybe one day I'll write something if nobody else does :-)
Also I have plans to use two scopes simultaneously - the 13.1" and 16" - with different filters sets. This would give me 2x the data and using different filters (eg CMY on one scope and RGB on the other) also reduces the noise.
Maybe next year I can try some of these things and see hpw far we can go...
Yep, that's my ugly mug next to a 14.5" f/5 newt on a pier with a Losmandy Titan head. Power and data go under the concrete and up into the shed you see behind where I keep computers and some beefy 12v dc power supplies.
I hope you do the 3D stacking program and this would be added to your long list of astronomy firsts which grows every year.
Not many people would come up with the idea to use two filter sets on different scopes, you certainly have more than good pictures of planets you have so much astronomy knowledge and original ideas it must be hard getting to sleep some knights thinking about this sort of stuff.
