Ganymede transit of Jupiter last saturday,

Hi All,
While I was looking at starry night last saturday evening, it was showing that ganymede would transit the disk and the GRS would be following behind it, this was the only reason why I went out under the full moon.
I took 5 set of shots, this was all I could get between the clouds, so one set was only 25 images while another was 400 images, so you can see the differance in the quality this gives.

You can also see europa coming in from the right.
Equipment = 12"LX200 (eq mode) + Toucam pro + laptop
Software = Astrosnap + registax2 + photoshop
Images taken at prime focus with flipmirror without a barlow.

I made an AVI of these 5 pics, but its too big for here.
Next time , I'll try and take the sets at regular interval throught the night, would make a nice video.



The seeing at times was very good that night, the image of jupiter through the eyepiece was even better again, best I've seen it in a long time. The full moon was about 4.5 degrees away.

david,
that is pretty amazing stuff, good work. it is amazing what can be done today, keep it up. it is amazing what can be achieved with a web cam these days, the sky is the limit.
stephen.

Below is an image I made of Jupiter Saturday night.
It shows Jupiter accompanied with Ganymede and Io further off to the left.
A video clip of 1,100 frames captured at a rate of 5fps by K3CCDtools was then processed in Registax. Final image cropping and contrast adjustments in Photoshop. I used a Philips Toucam Pro webcam and LX90. On this occassion I decided not to use a barlow due to the size of Jupiter at the moment.

Michael

Excellent shot there Michael,
you definitely have better seeing then what I can get here,
Anyway, I dont know why my pic in the first post didnt work, it was linking back to the SAC site and it looked like it worked for me first time when I posted it, anyway, here it is linked to the ifas site.

micheal,
this is also very good image. there is quite alot of detail there on jupiter. glad to see you are not going to be outdone by david , only joking.
stephen.

That's a nice series of images Dave. It's not often you can capture a transit of a planet's disc and shadow along with the GRS rolling around into view! If you specifically planned to capture that a few days in advance I can guanantee it'd be cloudy/raining! What i really like about your image is the fact you've caught the actual disc of the Ganymede. Very impressive!
As for the sky conditions, they weren't that good at all. The atmosphere was reasonably steady but certainly nothing exceptional. There was alot of haze which only allowed me to capture two video clips. I simply couldn't record anymore due to the conditions as they got worse as time went on. What worked in my favour I think was the number of frames I took. 1,100 should provide enough to get a reasonable level of detail.

Stephen: It does indeed amaze me how these webcams perform. For planetary use, they completely outperform many CCD cameras costing 50 times the value. What's also great is the software. Without Registax we'd be lost. It's an amazing program and considering it's free is simply fantastic. It's written by a guy who'd not even a full-time programmer - he works for the Dutch government as a professional bird spotter!

Michael