09/10/04

I finally got in some imaging time for Jupiter.  It was not visible in my 'window' between the trees until about 1:30 am.  It is about 45 deg from the horizon at that point so it was not bad.  

However my problem for the night was more that the air was still very wet.  I ended up with a lot of dew obstructing the view.  Then it finally started to cloud over.  But I did manage to take this!

No Great Red Spot, but I did manage to get  in the major 4 moons. 

It was taken  with a Celestron NexStar 8 and a Logitech Quickcam 4000.  I was mostly getting 5 fps, 640*480 capture for 55 seconds or 275 frames. The AVIs are then stacked with Registax, selecting around 50 frames.  (Dropping the worst manually, then using the difference and quality cuts on a restack against the 1 pass stack/Wavelet). I later touched the image up in Paint to get rid of the 'purple haze'. (Basically I blocked out most of the background with a true black.

I had also taken various other AVIs, but they did not really work out for the most part. But here are some snaps.

First is an example individual frame from the AVI that produced the above.

Interesting to note that really only one of the moons can be seen, and that is faint.

Then here is my attempt with a 2x Barlow.

I think the shutter speed needed to be too slow to capture it.  There is too much blurring.

Here is one good frame from it.  You can see some of the grain.  (Probably from use of gain...?)

With the clouds coming in, there was a lot of variance in the brightness. Take a look at the difference between these snaps from the same AVI.  (Note that each frame is at about 1/5th second, mid gain.)

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This site was last updated 03/18/04