April 16- Jupiter - Meade 10" ACF - ASI224MC

[Tyson M]

First decent Jupiter with my 10" Meade ACF telescope taken by myself on April 16, 2017. Focal length 5 meters, F20.

 

Captured with ZWO ASI224MC camera.

 

I had plenty of passerby's,and even though I got out early and set up- I stayed out late because I did a ton of outreach. Also, my power source custom deep cycle battery box failed briefly and my mount shut off, which I had to redo my alignment which was annoying.

 

Two different groups of young adults stopped by, and some curious police men which was a tad startling at first. I actually enjoyed their company the best. Showing them Jupiter was a treat.

 

Visually, while observing the Jovian king, I used both the 20mm Meade Super Wide Angle eyepiece and the 13 mm Tele Vue Nagler, Jupiter showed decent color. A nice brown selection of belts and of course, the great red spot.

 

I would say the night had average-to-moments-of-poor seeing. Intermittently saw a blackish smudge in on of the white sections, in pictures it's revealed as a blue/black colored outbreak by the North Equatorial Belt region.

 

Not sure how many belts I sawat the EP, 4 moons visible, one just peeking out from the limb. And of course, the Great Red Spot front and center. 

 

Larger image is 4 combined video stacks, best 20% of 4134 frames, for 3308 frames. Smaller image was resized smaller but 20% of 2500 frames I believe.

 

These are preliminary results, which I think are OK- but not quite what I was hoping for.

I am still very much a beginner planetary imager and my pictures with SCT have never quite equaled the quality of my refractor images.

I will be playing around with raw data to try and make them better but for now, I thought id share.

 

jupiter4gimp8moons1 by SolarT RM, on Flickr

 

jupiterrun3resized by SolarT RM, on Flickr

 

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Nice images Tyson.

[laudropb]

Very nice image. You have caught the festoons very well.

[Tyson M]

I am trying to isolate why rs6 wasn't giving me much more details. 

 

I have 6-7 runs of 3 or 4 avis to process. Figure out why RS6 is doing so little with so many frames. 

 

Last summer my 100mm refractor was getting this amount of detail with just rs6, didn't even have to use unsharpen mask or gaussian blur with gimp...

 

I collimated on Polaris with a 13mm Nagler and TV 3 x barlow...so it's either focus or processing......and I should be able to rule out focus with the refocusing I did on each of my runs.