Jupiter image

[starfinder]

Here is an image of Jupiter which I did this morning. North is up, and the Great Red Spot is visible in the Southern Equatorial Belt. Also visible are numerous vestoons, swirls and ovals.


Details:
Jupiter: 03 January 2006, 6:35am

Meade LX-90 8" SCT operating at f30 (i.e. 3x barlow).

Phillips Toucam Pro II webcam without any filter.

603 frames aligned, stacked, and sharpened with wavelet feature, all using Registax version 3.

320x240 pixels, 10 frames per second, at 1/25 second shutter speed. Saturation levels increased during recording.

As usual, I did not use any diagonals during imaging. That's like having a ultra-premium $1,000 diagonal with 100% reflectivity! However, I read somewhere that diagonals act like an infra-red filter of sorts. Maybe I will try using diagonals to experiment.


I did a colour adjustment with Photoshop to decrease the blue cast and increase the red cast. This is because the image was obtained at 6.35am, and like the sky, the appearance of Jupiter was already turning a bit blue. Cheating a bit on the image, but hey, so does NASA.

I think the image of Jupiter is not as sharp as my previous images of Saturn and Mars. The seeing was not very steady this morning.

Anyway, my own visual view of Jupiter at 300x this morning was quite poor. This has been the case recently. Jupiter seems to be whitewashed, and I saw little detail and colour. I seem to recall viewing Jupiter previously with a lot more detail and colour. Maybe it's my sleepy eyes at 6am.

However, I was rewarded with a view of the 4 Galilean moons flanking the planet, two on each side, which was quite nice. BTW, I've thought up an easy way to remember the 4 moons from the inner to the outer ones (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). Just remember: "I Eat Good Curries".


Appended below this image is one of the original raw video frames, as well as the original image before the colour cast adjustment.

[starfinder]

Here is one of the 603 raw frames

[starfinder]

And here is the Jupiter image before the colour adjustment. Looks like its face was running out of oxygen. ha ha.

[wucheeyiun]

well done!

i begin to feel that our local amature astronomers deserves more citation...internationally.

there is a lot of work done here that deserve good feedback. This is not a simple hobby. Requires good skill in stacking and attiitude to do your best in it.

Try to use "drizzle" in registrax 3 to increase image size and resolution....it will look a lot better.

its a good effort.

[Airconvent]

nice effort, gavin !
personally I would have preferred a less contrasty output but I guess its the preference...looks like you are now a pro...when will you hold classes for budding astrophotgraphers?

[Bergkamp_]

well taken =)

[starfinder]

Thanks wucheeyiun, Richard, and D. Bergkamp for your feedback.

I didn't know that Registax has a drizzle feature. Will read up about it and try it as suggested. Thanks!


BTW, as stated by me before in relation to the images of Mars and Saturn, most of the credit for these images should go to Cor Berrevoets, the writer of Registax, which is a fantastic piece of software. And also to the designers at Meade for the fine optics and mechanics, and Phillips/Sony for the CCD imager. My only skill was focusing the image and adjusting the settings in Registax here and there.


I suspect that modern amateur equipment and software now allow amateurs/novices to produce astro images which are better than even a lot of professional observatory equipment a generation ago.

[rcj]

hi starfinder!
nice image of the gas giant! I think wcy's reference to drizzle is to make the jovian disk bigger. I use that too. Try 2X sampling via Mitchell algorithm. You can use Bell too. Note that processing will take a little longer but think it will be worth the wait.
See you at AF2006!
Remus

[universe24]

Nice shot! So much detail on the image. The final result image looks a bit bright and some colour at the edge...try to reduce contrast and colour shift function in R3 to adjust it. Hopefully you can bigger Jupiter in the future and I can expected till then more detail on Jupiter surface can be taken by you. Keep up the great work.

[Airconvent]

hi gavin
just realised your raw images are only slightly better than the ones I used to take using my ex-Nikon CP4300 on my ETX105! Man, if I had taken a whole bunch of them and stacked them properly, maybe I can get about 50% close to your output! :-) too bad I have already sold my entire astrophotography setup...