Some help please with imaging Jupiter + it's moons

[ilove1995]

Hi All,

Apologies in advance for the long post...

I've had several goes at imaging Jupiter with a webcam in the past week or so and last nights imaging with it's GSR seemed to work out ok (see attached).

What I'm trying to do though is capture a detailed image of Jupiter including it's four largest moons which I'm failing miserably at. If I understand correctly I believe what your supposed to do is image Jupiter as normal then whack the exposure up as much as possible to enable the webcam to pick up on the moons.

I made one attempt at this last night but I think I must have gone about it wrong as I captured 700 frames imaging Jupiter then filmed another 300 with exposure max'd out. When I stacked the images combined using Lynkeos I got a washed out image of Jupiter and none of the frames appears to have captured it's moons.

I'm using a Revelation 2.5x barlow with my 4 inch mak (Nexstar 4se). Should I perhaps attempt this without using the Barlow? Can anyone suggest where I am going wrong with the above?

One thing that limits me with planetary imaging is that I'm doing this with a macbook using an orion starshoot solar imager iv. The images save as .mov so I therefore use Lynkeos on the macbook to stack the images. I have got a desktop pc on windows 7 with registax 5 but it doesn't accept .mov files. As I have started to get to grips with Lynkeos I've not had any reason to attempt to learn registax 5 so I tend to do everything on the macbook.

Any help would be much appreciated. It's so frustrating to start getting somewhere with imaging Jupiter but not to be able to include it's four moons.

Many Thanks

Al

Jupiter by George.tiff

[Bizibilder]

Your little Mak and "webcam" set-up has quite a small field of view so getting the Moons may be a bit tricky! First you will need to pick a night and time when some, or maybe all, of the four Galilean Moons are apparently near to the disc of Jupiter. Secondly, work without the barlow as this will reduce the FOV even more. To get your image you will need to take, as you say, two seperate images. The first exposed correctly for the planetary disc and one with the exposure/gain turned up (but not necessarily to full) to get the Moons. You then need to stack the sets of images seperately or, as you found, they will simply "merge" into one. When you have done that you then need to use some Photo processing software (GIMP is freeware) and cut out your "good" Jupiter and paste it over the overexposed version (you may also need to tidy up the glare of the overexposed version first).

To change your .mov files to .avi you can use "Virtual Dub" which is freeware.

Hope that helps.

[ilove1995]

Hi Roger,

Thanks for the advice. We've got clear skies where I am so I'll have another crack a bit later.

Many Thanks

Al