Jupiter & Europa transit 5 May 2018 - Mono v Colour Camera comparison

[geoflewis]

With a second night of fair seeing I wanted to try a comparison between capturing data with my mono ZWO ASI120 camera using R-G-B filters and capturing RGB colour data with my old Imaging Source DBK21AU04.AS. The below images both show Europa in transit which was blured after derotation so I've cut and paste a separately processed transit region for each based on the average time stamp for the stacked images. The first imaged is from the mono ZWO and comprised 9 AVI runs of 4000 frames using the sequence RGB-RGB-RGB; the central RGB was used for the Europa 'fix'. The second image is from the colour DBK camera and comprised 7 AVI runs, with the middle run used for Europa.

The seeing deteriorated during the session, so whilst I could use best 20% of each mono AVI, I had to drop to best 10% for the colour DBK data of which there was also less (7 v 9 AVIs). Nevertheless I think it is clear that the final image from the mono R-G-B runs is superior, though much more challenging to capture and process. I suspect that the results would have been much closer if I had a faster ASI120MC (colour camera). For now it seems that I'll be sticking with the mono capture sequences....

Of course YMMV and I note that Pete Edwards ASI224MC (colour) outperformed his ASI120MM (Mono)

Regards, Geof