geoflewis

Trust me Reggie, you're not alone, just check out some of my recent posts and that's onlty the versions I've shared....🙄

Very nice Steve, the increased colour saturation worked well

Very nice result, looks like the derotation worked well.

Very nice results Andy

Very nice Peter, I really should think about trying to image Venus....🤔

Nicely done Reggie, If I may offer some, hopefully, constructive critique, perhaps hold back on the processing a tad, as I think a softer version might be more aesthetic.

Superb images Avani

Thanks Steve, but as you suggest, it's not for me at that price. I wonder who they are selling them to.....

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: 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...🤯) Grade the video in PIPP to keep, say, just the best 20%, which I think would reduce the file to ~10GB Derotate the graded video in WinJupos. Stack in AS3! Other post processing, in Registax, Astrosurface, Image Analyser, etc. I'll be iterested to learn what you find if you do try it.

It's certainly an advantage of having a permanent set up in an observatory. I'd never have set up in those conditions, but I seeing where the jet stream was I was fairly confident that the seeing would be good, which was quickly confirmed so I stuck at it.

My C14 is not an Edge, but an older Starbright XLT. I will try without the ADC though, so thanks for your feedback.

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.....🤪

An excellent project and very nice images. Did you reach any conclusions yet about the different configuration? I've been imaging at ~F12/F13, essentially the native FL of my C14 with the slight amplification from the ADC, so undersampled. I needed the ADC for Saturn, but I'm probably done imaging that this year, so with Jupiter now up at ~50° I found that the ADC prisms are set to zero. Hence I'm thinking of taking it the ADC out and attaching my Baader barlow lens inside the camera nosepiece to get me up to ~F18, which would be a bit over sampled with the ASI462MC camera (2.9mn px), but probably making full use of the potential resolution of the rig.

Thanks both, yes a lot of work and a huge amout of data. I keep all my data both on local HDs and also upload to cloud storage. This session was over 330GB of data in 133 SERs and associated files. I started to upload it to the cloud yesterday afternoon, and currently some 20 hours later it's still esimating 8 more hours to complete the upload. Unfortunately living in a rural location, I don't have the possibility of FTTH (very fast fibre), so it's a long slow process.

Having completed processing the 7 sets of data to get high resolution images, I thought this might be a good way to show the progress of Jupiter and Io through the night of 27/28 Oct 2023. You can zoom in and scroll through them side by side without having to jump between different images. I still have the GIF to consider, but I won't be able to show that in such high resolution, as it's too much work fixing the smeared Europa and shadow on the large quantity of derotated stacks that I need for a smooth GIF presentation, so I'll probably be using the individally processed 'best 2000 frame' stacks from the 133 videos that I captured.

I like the extra colour Stuart

....and I equally appreciate your's and others critique. My friend is strictly a DSO imager, mostly with a short tube refactor, but has always wanted to know what I do to get my planetary images. It was great showing the steps involved to someone that understands the challenges of astrophotography, but has never dabbled with planetary imaging.

Thanks Kostas, I did think that was the best set, so of course I had to ruin it by pushing too hard. There was so much processing to do that I was getting cross-eyed or screen blindness. I had an astronomy friend over today who wanted to watch me process some data, so I slowly took him through Set 6 of 7, then later completed the final set; it took me about 3 hours to demo whilst also explaining the purpose of each step.

Thanks Michael

I took another look at that data set and IIRC I was still experimenting with the best way to handle the shadow transit, so had a few different versions. I've just reprocessed it and can see that I did in fact increase the HF wavelet strength in my original, so have backed that off to where I processed the others. It's subtle but I thin better in version 2, so what do you think?

If anyone is interested I processed the last 2 sets of data from the other night and added them alonside the others at the start of this thread. The final image has less data, mostly because my hard drive was full, but in any case the sky was deteriating quickly with thickening cloud and I'd only kept going in the hope that I could capture the completion of Europa's transit. It's shadow had exited right, but Europa still had a few minutes still to go. My next challeng will be to try to generate a GIF of the entire session, but that's probably for another day. I have just checked Jupiter's Moons and see that the GRS will be transiting tonight between 10pm and 3am without any moons, but do I want another long session; I'm still recovering from the previous two.... 🤔

Thanks guys. @Kon, it's interesting isn't it, as I applied identical sharpening to all the images, but I have to agree with you that it looks too much on the 3rd one. I'll probably revisit it and see if I can dial it back a tad. Thanks for the helpful critique.

That's superb Mandy

That's superb Magnus.

I forgot about it, but no matter as been lashing with rain here most of the evening. Some nice captures posted here so thanks for sharing the experience.