Space Cowboy

They look fabulous Geof! Well done! Your persistence has paid off!

22 hours ago, Kon said:

What? Are you telling me that I have to wait another decade for some decent weather? I should move back to Greece or setup a remote observatory there 🤪

Greece sounds more promising 🤣

Another one for the record! Excellent under the circumstances.

Well done Geof! As you say it's fascinating to see the change in transit shadows. Even if seeing isn't great Jupiter always delivers.

On 03/11/2023 at 14:11, Kon said:

I think we need to let June rest...😂....so many good captures that the imaging gods are punishing us now. I will probably tell my future grand children  about June 2023  😂. .

June 2014 was pretty good too 😎 I'm not letting experiences like that rest.....without those memories i'd be packing this in lol

1 minute ago, Kon said:

Thansk Stuart. It's nice to have got it but I am jealous seeing images of other imagers from abroad getting spectacular seeing. 

What could we have got with that June seeing lol

Nicely captured Kostas! I bow to your persistence 👏

Excellent animation Geof! To collect that amount of data is a minor miracle considering the weather conditions of late. I would think the OSC has been a big help grabbing captures between the clouds.

Hope you had a good weekend in the lake District Kostas 🙂

Oddly enough I was only thinking the other day I hadn't seen a transit shadow over the GRS for a long time! Well captured! Not great seeing but a very interesting record of those quirky transits that make Jupiter so special.

My baader UV filter was £130 so only 40 quid more than the Amazon set Kostas has. Certainly don't regret it but the weather was fantastic in June which made all the difference. Wish I'd invested in a UV filter years ago but they were more expenive then. Always something different on Venus.

8 minutes ago, geoflewis said:

Thanks Stuart,

That link is to an internal drive, but I do have a few 1Tb, 2TB and 4TB My Passport external USB drives, which I believe are NVMe, so I could use one of those, which is what I was considering using in my reply to @Pete Presland

Yep, they fit in an external case but if you already have something similar thats great!

Obviously speed is effected by the quality of your laptop but these things are lightening fast :

Samsung 980 1 TB PCIe 3.0 (up to 3.500 MB/s) NVMe M.2 Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (MZ-V8V1T0BW) https://amzn.eu/d/5ppknqC

6 minutes ago, geoflewis said:

I also use auto center ROI, but as you say, still have to watch that it doesn't drift off the sensor. That become even more of an issue if/when I add a barlow into the imaging train, which of course also leads to bigger file sizes. Sorry, I don't know what an NVMe SSD is, but it's not the speed of transfer that's an issue, just the size of the SSD.

NVMe works as an external SSD plugged into the USB port so you can quickly transfer data if the lappy gets full. £50 for a good quality 1tb. There are cheaper makes but they can slow up as they get full.

58 minutes ago, geoflewis said:

I agree, not much difference in speed, but a 20% reduction in file size, which is a significant win I think. Yes, I use a combination of FireCapture's ROI and Cut Out features to reduce file sizes. I could probably go a bit tighter, but I'm not using auto guidimg, so the target does drift within the ROI a bit, requiring me to nudge the mount with the HC every few minutes. I guess my next experiment might be to try autoguiding, though currently I don't know what I need for that with planetary imaging....

Very true 20% extra disk space is a lot. My tracking is not good enough to use the crop feature so I use the auto centre of ROI but have to watch the planet doesn't eventually slide off the sensor.

Have you tried a NVMe  SSD for fast data transfer? I can transfer 100 gigs from my laptop in 5 mins.

Not much difference in those shutter speeds 🙂 Have you tried FC's cropping feature to save HDD space? FC locks onto the planet only recording that area of the ROI. Think it's called "cut out".

57 minutes ago, geoflewis said:

I'm not sure how video derotation would help unless you were captureing everything in a very long SER file, as AS3! has no issue aligning the moon and shadows from a 1m SER.

When I tried video derotation of Mars last year the file size of the derotated SER was approximately double the original SER, i.e a 6min SER at 3ms (330fps) with the small ROI 300x300 required for Mars was approx 10 GB, which after derotation was ~20GB. When I tried a larger ROI of 400x400 the original 6m SER was 18GB and the derotated SER 36GB. This was far too large, so I gave up derotating the SERs for Mars, as the rotation was minimal in 6 mins and I couldn't tell the difference.

If I was going to try SER derotation for Jupiter, then I guess my workflow might go something like this:

1. Capture a very long video, say 10m-15m (based on my 8ms capture speed, with the much larger ROI (600x600), the initial file would be ~50GB...🤯)
2. Grade the video in PIPP to keep, say, just the best 20%, which I think would reduce the file to ~10GB
3. Derotate the graded video in WinJupos.
4. Stack in AS3!
5. Other post processing, in Registax, Astrosurface, Image Analyser, etc.

I'll be iterested to learn what you find if you do try it.

 

Yep I used vid Derot on Mars a couple of times. The key for me is the field derotation which Derot of images does not do so possibly that would help with the transit.

I've a feeling someone on CN said vid Derot was better for transits or I could have dreamt it. 🙂

Nicely captured Pete!

15 hours ago, geoflewis said:

Thanks Stuart,

I'm not derotating the videos, but derotating the TIFF stack of best 2000 frames from each video. Unfortunately the moon correction tool in WinJupos doesn't do a great job, when in actual transit, but it's just about ok when the moon is still off to the side.. It does align the moon and shadow, but leaves a nasty artifact around them, so I still have to photoshop (I actually use Affinity Photo now, but you know what I mean) the moon and shadow back in from a lower resolution single video stack, with as near identical time stamp as the derotate stack. To be honest it's a complete faff, but when the data is good its worth the extra messing around. However, it's why I'm not going to go for high res data if I do compile the GIF - even I don't have the stomach for photoshop moon and shadow corrections on ~100 separate images.

I do have several external HDs for my archive, but a couple of years ago when I went to retrieve something, one of them the drive had died, losing several years of data. Actually I was fortunate that I had a lot of that on more than one drive, but I couldn't recover that HD I sent it to a friend who works in the IT industry, who was able to recover the images (SERS and TIFFs), but all the associted EXIF data, etc., was lost, so I just had a buch of videos with no file names, date, or time stamp, so pretty damn useless to me. After that I took the decision to upload to cloud as well as keeping local HD storage - so belt and braces.

But you're right, there's definitely too much cloud.....🤪

Thanks for the feedback Geof. I might try video derotation  just to compare . It must be 10 years since I tried derotation on a transit.

I can see why you use the cloud. At least they come in useful for something 😉

Wow, you've been busy Geof! Those repros look very nice! 

I take it video derotation doesn't mess up the moon transit like derotation of images?  I thought maybe that problem had been fixed but Derot of images messed up mine.

I use a HDD rather than cloud.... enough of the bloody stuff around here already 😜

Thanks fellas! Think sometimes I focus too much on the imperfections. I do find the original quite mesmerising in a way I've not seen before on my animations. Maybe it's the way the field rotation has orientated Jupiter. I'm amazed how consistent the images are considering seeing wasn't good and trans was hazy.

Polished up the animation. Not sure if the original looks better as the extra colour on this shows up the GIF compression artifacts? :

Superb result Harvey. I'm all for plenty of colour to bring out the detail and textures. I'd rather people enhance the colour rather than over sharpen. Well done!

23 minutes ago, Pete Presland said:

Excellent images and animation, some very nice details visible there. 

Cheers Pete! Just got to run these images through winjupos and see if I can bring more detail out.

16 hours ago, Barv said:

Love that animation Stuart! Very Cool 🙂

Thanks Harvey! Animations give such a live feel to planetary imaging.

Cheers Reggie!

16 hours ago, geoflewis said:

THose are really nice images Stuart and the animation is different, but very cool 😎

Cheers Geof! Gotta love that field rotation effect 🙃