Jupiter: First attempt with ZWO ASI 462 Planetary Camera

[johnturley]

Last night (28-29 August) was my first attempt at photographing Jupiter with my recently acquired ZWO ASI 462 Planetary Camera, previously I have used my Canon 6D digital SLR.

Because of the way things are set up in my observatory shed it was easier to attach the camera, with the USB cable leading to my also recently acquired Dell laptop, to my Esprit 150 rather than my 14 in Newtonian. I have also installed Sharpcap on the laptop, and found this a bit more user friendly than the ZWO ASI software,

Last night was the first clear night at my location for about 10 days, and viewing conditions were quite good, in addition there was a shadow transit of Io in progress which visually showed up very nicely as a sharp black dot through the Esprit. 

However on connecting the camera to the telescope, and the former to the laptop, all I could see on the  laptop screen was a bright featureless disc, plus a couple of the Jovian satellites, but after reducing the 'Gain' setting  to the minimum I could just make out the two main cloud belts, although the view was not a patch on what was visible through an eyepiece, and there was no sign of Io's shadow. Much less detail was visible than would probably have been the case if I had attached my Canon 6D in eyepiece projection mode.

Nevertheless I decided to try a series on one minute exposures, with the frame rate set to the maximum of 30 frames per second, and after processing the best one in Registax, attach the resultant image  which is a big improvement on what was visible on the laptop screen at the time, and does show Io's shadow. 

Would welcome any advice on what I might need to do to the settings in Sharpcap to get better results, would I have done better using the ZWO ASI software. I appreciate the image scale is small, and that I probably need to add a 2.5x or 5x Powermate to increase the image size.

John  

 

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by johnturley

[CraigT82]

Nice shot, doesn't sound like you did anything wrong in sharpcap, you can use the RoI feature to cut out the planet on the sensor and increase the frame rate. A 2.5x powermate would do well too.