Jupiter with Io Transit animation

[Kbramley]

When the thin wispy cloud ruined my attempts at some deepsky the other night I switched my attention to Jupiter as it rose above the houses. At the time I had no idea what i was about to witness but it goes down as one of my favourite observations ever, the transit of Io across Jupiter complete with shadow which amazingly coincided with the GRS

I was only going to have a quick look before I packed up for the night but spotted on Cartes du Ciel that Io was about to transit, so i popped in the Lifecam and took a few avis, well to cut a long story short it ended up being 40x90s avi's in total, a whole 40GB of data lol and I was still grabing data when it came light. The seeing was superb and I had one of my best visual observtions of Jupiter every, even though I could no colour, the detail was mind boggling using my 3x barlow and 7mm eyepiece, I have never seen so much detail on Jupiter before.

The Lifecam HD isnt the best planetary camera and I really wish i had used the full HD now, but opted for 640x480 to get the faster FPS, I was surprised i could capture the moons and jupiter at the same time, in the past I have had to over expose Jupiter to get the moons.

So here is the result of nearly 2 hours data, a 40 frame animation of the transit, hope you like it - you may need to open it into a new window to see animation

Keith

[si@nite]

Well done Keith, yes what a treat to see shadow transit pass over grs.

[Ganymede12]

That looks stunning! I like the fact that you can also see the clouds of Jupiter moving!

What telescope did you use?

[Kbramley]

That looks stunning! I like the fact that you can also see the clouds of Jupiter moving!

What telescope did you use?

I was using the MN190 with a 2x Barlow, I'm gutted I didn't capture it in HD though, I had one avi at the full resolution and there is so much more detail, oh well maybe next time

[Cath]

I do like a good animation

[cstew]

That is pretty spectacular!

[Breakintheclouds]

That's fantastic, and weirdly hypnotic - I think I watched it about 15 times in a row!

[Kbramley]

Cheers for the comments, I found the processing tricky, especially getting the brightness the same across all 40 frames.

One this I learned very quickly was to keep the door to the conservatory closed, I was imaging directly above it and when open the heat rising made a noticeable difference in the image stability.

[Virgoman]

Super animation Keith. Great detail. The transits are fascinating to watch.

[JohnC]

Really great animation, thanks for sharing.

[Ganymede12]

So would I be able to see that much detail in Jupiter with a Skyliner 200P Dobsonian?

[Olorin]

very nice animation, you have some onion rings on Jupiter, can you give some detail on your set-up capturing and processing? this can point to the reason.

Other than that it's a great work and it takes a lot of time and patience to do such animations, well done

Dror

[Kbramley]

So would I be able to see that much detail in Jupiter with a Skyliner 200P Dobsonian?

Absolutely, when I peeked through the eyepiece after the imaging run the detail I could see with a 3x barlow and 7mm eyepeice was amazing, I could see more with my eye than the webcam resolved, seeing was very good however and this makes a huge difference at high mags, your 200P has slightly more aperture than my MN190, and a slightly longer focal length, you should be able to see plenty of detail on Jupiter (although not much colour), I imagine adding filters would boost contrast even more. Your only issue I guess would be tracking, my scope is mounted on a EQ6 mount and was perfectly aligned, also I have an electronic focusser which makes focussing far far easier on planets.

I had to stand on a chair to see through the eyepice though

HTH

Keith

[Ganymede12]

your 200P has slightly more aperture than my MN190, and a slightly longer focal length

I don't have the 200P yet (which is why I asked what Jupiter would look like). It's 4 months away

[Kbramley]

Aha I see, So a Xmas pressie then maybe , Jupiter should be perfectly placed by Xmas, nice and high at sensible times

just don't let the clouds out of the box.....

[neil phillips]

Nice captures,and animation. Well worth putting in a camera. If you can get a spc 900 or better still a DBK i reckon your mak newt will surprise you even more. you could easily go to about f30 with a scope so nice.And reveal even more detail. If you wanted to go further

[Kbramley]

very nice animation, you have some onion rings on Jupiter, can you give some detail on your set-up capturing and processing? this can point to the reason.

Other than that it's a great work and it takes a lot of time and patience to do such animations, well done

Dror

Agreed there is a bit of over sharpening in Registax going on, the problem I had was I used the same settings each time in an attempt to keep things uniform, but due to the variable seeing across two hours te quality of each frame of animation changed, if I get chance I will give this another bash with much lower processing in Registax and only slight processing in PS, the result will be more washed out but smoother.

For info though I captured 40x 90s avi's in 640x480 in sharp cap YUY2.

In Registax 5 I stacked the best 150-200 frames each time with all settings as default, and only used wavelets nothing else at the end, saving each file as a TIFF

In PS I applied a levels layer to all frames and hue/sat layer to all frames to increase contrast and get better colour balance, with the worst frames getting individual special treatment.

Keith

[Ganymede12]

Aha I see, So a Xmas pressie then maybe , Jupiter should be perfectly placed by Xmas, nice and high at sensible times

just don't let the clouds out of the box.....

I saving up for the 200P myself. My Birthday's very early in December so I'm going to buy the dob and get money for EP's on my birthday!

[Kbramley]

Just for comparision here is the result of the single higher res avi (1280x800) I took before starting the full image sequence in the lower 640x480 res- now you can see why i was gutted I didnlt use this res all the way through , must admit i'm very pleased with the Lifecams performance here as I have been dissapointed with it in the past on the planets, only found it useful on the Moon. This is a stack of about 200 frames from 600.

Keith

[Zul]

Great job!

[ronaldo999]

i think the processing of the image is just as difficult as the actual imaging, good software makes the job easier. Lots of options available.

[KE400]

Top work here Keith, really enjoyed the animation and the later still image looks great with lots of detail coming through.

You're on to a winner and I'd certainly keep at it. I haven't attempted an animation as yet but this has certainly inspired me to give it a try in the coming months.

Thanks for posting

[Olorin]

Keith, based on the information you gave I can give some advise to improve for next time :-)

Try to take longer AVIs I use 3 minutes for each AVI with 3 minutes waiting interval between them.

In Registax stack more frames (around 1000) this will give a better image.

Last you haven't given the SharpCap capture parameter but I suspect that you had gamma up (thus the onion rings) try to have gamma on 0 (balance the light only with exposure and gain).

Hope this helps. Well done on this animation, looking forward to your next one :-)

Dror

[Space Cowboy]

Very smooth animation! As Neil said with a better camera you will knock out some cracking shots.

[Kbramley]

Keith, based on the information you gave I can give some advise to improve for next time :-)

Try to take longer AVIs I use 3 minutes for each AVI with 3 minutes waiting interval between them.

In Registax stack more frames (around 1000) this will give a better image.

Last you haven't given the SharpCap capture parameter but I suspect that you had gamma up (thus the onion rings) try to have gamma on 0 (balance the light only with exposure and gain).

Hope this helps. Well done on this animation, looking forward to your next one :-)

Dror

Hi Dror,

Thanks for the good advice and tips, I havent imaged Jupiter or any planet a lot so its a steep learning curve . I think SharpCap stores the capture info in a text file so when im back home I will dig out the exact parameters, the Lifecam doesnt half do some odd things with exposure, gamma and brightness though.

Looking forward to trying this again though in the future, I will certainly try the longer avi length, incidently at what point does the rotation of Jupiter begin the smear the detail?, I note between my images (90s long with a 60s gap) the moons of Jupiter moved a whole "moon" width as they appeared as seperate dots when aligning the frames for the animation, at over 3 minutes would I not start to get eggy moons.

Thanks all for you kind comments too

Keith