Jupiter through the Megrez 72

[Gonzo]

Don't laugh at the back, I can hear you...

Last night, it was a little bit cloudy but I wanted to try my tripod and the field flattener (bought off someone here on this forum, thanks) and my GF1 Lumix.

I took many pictures, but had to throw away quite a lot, ended up keeping 4 I think. Used Deepskystacker to stack them (used a dark frame) and the result if what you see up there.

I didn't use any tracking or setup the tripod/mount to polaris, it was just a point and shoot

Now the multi million $/£ question....

Is this what I should expect or let me re-phrase this as

Is there a magic trick that no-one told me yet, something like: hey dude you need to use this and that to be able to take pictures of Jupiter's bands....

[virtualpilot45]

Firstly, never use DeepSkyStacker for this kind of image, DSS is used for very faint, far away objects, not bright planets.

For Deep Sky - transparency is most important.

For Planetary - visibility is most important (ie, the image must be stable, and not wobbling everywhere)

Since there are few moments of good 'seeing' (visibility), still photographs are hardly ever used, and videos take their place. A video is basically 25 pictures per second. Of a 30s clip, you can get 15s or so of good quality images. A planetary program such as Registax takes the best of the video frames and finds an average between them all, thus eliminating any video artefacts such as messy pixels.

Therefore with your current setup, you can try just lining up the camera lens with the eyepiece lens, and video record Jupiter drifting across the field of view. Then, take the AVI file, and feed it into Registax, which is very easy to use once you get the hang of it.

Hope I helped

[Gonzo]

cool beans, thanks for helping

In the mean time, I've done a Google search for megrez+jupiter in the pictures section and found similar results to mine.

I'll try to take a movie with the GF1 next time the sky is clear. Thanks again for the tips

[virtualpilot45]

It's rather good considering you used DSS for it