Jupiter 03 November

Hi All,

Image of Jupiter (2nd Attempt ever) taken last night from Lucan, Co dublin.

Jupiter 3rd November 2011




Taken with an ETX-125 Mak OTA (F/15) on an LXD-75 GEM, Phillips SPC900NC Baader IR Cut filter and a Meade #140 2 X Barlow. 1500 Frames at 10 fps, stacked and tweaked in Registax.

Seeing was pretty bad, Jupiter jumped around a fair bit, also I think my focus was out by a bit. But I'm reasonably happy. Still need to flip the image to its correct orientation by the way.

Hope to have another go tonight. This time I'll focus with the Bahtinov Mask before hand.

Neil

Hi Neil,

That’s a really good image and only your second attempt .
As for focusing I try to focus on one of the moons, you may have to
up the gain to bring it into view, then get it as sharp on screen as you
can then back off on the gain.

Well done again.
Tony

1500 frames at 10 frames per second is 150 seconds - planet rotation will also degrade your image. A general recommendation by others on this forum is to aim for no more than 50s duration to avoid rotational smear.

At the same time you want as many frames as possible and each exposure as short as possible (seeing changes faster than 10 times per second and you want as many frames with good seeing as possible) so you should aim to get the frame rate up to 30 frames per second.

I believe that this is achieved by turning up the gain. I think the idea is that automatic exposure will deliver higher pixel values quicker when amplified - hence can deliver frames quicker - but one of the planetary imagers can correct me and advise you on how to do that.

The received advice (again from the planetary imagers on this forum) is that while these frames are noiser, that noise is easier to mitigate for in post-capture processing than trying to sharpen up poorer seeing captured in longer frame exposure time.

The Bahtinov mask can be very effective - use it on a star to obtain focus before slewing to Jupiter.

Your image is a fine second attempt - well done!

Mark C.

Excellent 2nd only image!
on the linked image it's 640 x 480
what did you record the avi file size as?

Great image, congratulations Neil, nice view of the GRS

Well done Neil,

When Jupiter is jumping around like that make sure you run it through the optomiser in registax.
Seeing is always a major factor at high resolution and never really gets below two arc seconds. The best thing to do make sure your scope is cooled down. Well columinated and focused and everything else will fall into place.

well done again.

Carl.