jupiter 01-01-12

[Nortilus (Josh)]

another go at jupiter, after a bit more learning and a bit more playing...

[Clayton]

Good start Josh
If you want any advice, it will help if you can add some details of the capture eg. scope size and barlows used if any, type of camera and it's settings, length of the capture in seconds or minutes and the conditions at the time like seeing, and even the mount used.
Some people add the bits that are constant to their signature to save repeating it every time.
All I can really tell you is that the image is fairly under exposed, so next time try to use a slower shutter speed or bump up the gain a bit, but not to the point where it is so bright that detail is lost through burning out.
This is meant as constructive advice. Most of us began with images like this or in my case worse But with a bit of help most of us improve with time and experience

[Nortilus (Josh)]

Updated the sig should of done that awhile ago..

Also used craterlet for AVI capture with the SPC900, 60fps for 60secs. Used registax to do the rest...I know I have alot to learn so all the advise is welcome...

[Clayton]

OK Josh thanks for the extra info
From what I understand the GSO 8" is an f4 system. From your image I am assuming that you used a 2X Barlow? (around f8) To maximise the amount of detail you can capture you will need to increase this to an f ratio somewhere in the mid 20's so probably a 5X Barlow would benefit.
Any barlow (of reasonable quality) will help though and by adding some space between the barlow and the camera with extension tubes or redundant barlow tubes with optics removed then extra gains in scale can be achieved.
60fps sounds awfully fast to me and whilst I don't have experience with the SPC900 and hence am not speaking with authority on this, I would expect that you would be losing information due to data compression at that rate? and would recomend a series of tests from 10fps at each higher frame rate up to 60fps (repeat this a few times to verify your results) then process them all identically and compare.
Not sure if Craterlet has a live histogram display, but a histo display is a great tool to aid in setting good exposure levels, again it is a bit of suck it and see, but for Jupiter a rough guide would be to try to fill the Histogram to about 80% full on the X (horizontal) Axis. Mars seems to need a bit less and Saturn is hard to get that high without sacrificing a reasonable shutter speed but seems to tolerate a lower histo, so a bit less is quite acceptable.
Last but not least try to capture for around 3-4 min/avi as this will help with the signal to noise ratio, allowing you a bit more lattitude with waveletts etc before the image begins to look noisy
Good luck and I hope to see more of your work soon