Jupiter from last night

[legion48]

I got home from work at about 22:00 last night (I'm on lates this week) and glanced at the sky as I came in the back gate. I was pleasantly surprised to see a clear patch of sky about where Jupiter would be at about 23:30. I checked again at 23:00 and the clear patch was still there so I decided to set up and see what happened.

What happened was that my RA drive seems to have packed up! The little green light was on but the drive wouldn't work. Ah, I thought, it must be the batteries. They've probably got enough juice to power the light but not to drive the scope. A quick change of batteries and still no joy. :? Anyway, by this time Jupiter had duly appeared in my, still, clear patch and I only had about 15 minutes before I would lose it behind the trees. I was using eyepiece projection and resulting image size on the laptop meant that I could only capture about 12 seconds of avi at a time. I ended up with half a dozen avi's and about 800 frames in total.

I am both pleased and disappointed with the end result. Pleased with the image scale eyepiece projection (10mm ep) gave me - this image looks about the same size as the Jupiter I imaged in April and that was prime focus + x2 barlow + x2 resampling. Disappointed because either my scope badly needs collimation and/or my cheapo 10mm eyepiece is a piece of drek. At least that's what I'm blaming on the blue fringing on the left edge of the image.

If it was the eyepiece, does anyone know if there are certain eyepieces that excell at eyepiece projection or will any decent one do as well as any other?

[mpeniak]

Did you do RGB allignment in Registax? It always sorts blue and red fringing and it also improves the detail of the features.

Martin

[legion48]

Yep, I did that.

[geppetto]

To be honest, I'm amazed that you guys get Jupiter

images as good as that.

Very poor here trying to image it through the murk.

I reckon you should be pleased with that all things considered

Hope you get your drive sorted!

[legion48]

To be honest, I'm amazed that you guys get Jupiter

images as good as that.

Very poor here trying to image it through the murk.

I reckon you should be pleased with that all things considered

Hope you get your drive sorted!

Thanks mate.

As for the drive, I fixed it! I have just been looking at it and the large cog was "free wheeling". I tightened a screw and bingo, it works again.

[geppetto]

I tightened a screw and bingo, it works again

Good to hear 8)