Jupiter 26-27 Oct 2023 (no family pics this time)

[geoflewis]

Despite the uncertain forecast I headed out again last night to image Jupiter. I think I've got all I can expect from Saturn this aparition, so it was a later start, but with Jupiter at a higher elevation, which was good. The seeing was average to fair when I started, so I experimented with some different capture speeds, setling on 5ms (180fps) for the first couple of sequences to try to freeze the seeing. This creates bigger files per 1m SER and I wasn't convinced that I was gaining much from the extra frames, so paused to experiment some more with slower captures of 8ms (125fps) and 13ms (76fps). To me 8ms seemed to his the sweet spot of speed and SNR, so I stuck with that for the remainder of the session.

As Jupiter got to its highest elevation the seeing suddenly improved, so I tweeked focus to good effect before tha last two sequences of 20 videos. The best result is the 2nd last image from the sequence, as unfortunately fog started to develop quite quickly, so much so that was sitting in thick fog in my observatory by the time I finished.

Below is the best image from the sequence, followed by a series of six images that I created from the more than 70 SERs that I captured.

For the first 2 images I stacked best 2500 frames from each video, the remainder best 2000 frames reflecting the different capture speeds, but both being ~20% of total frames per video. Each image comprises between 8-11 SERs, so maybe 10m-15m elapsed time. Images were graded and stacked in AS3!, slightly processed in Registax6 to give WinJups derotation something to work on. The derotated stacks were then taken into Astrosurface for further wavelets, noise reduction, colour balance and saturation. From there they were taken into Image Analyser to use the frequency domain filter, colour noise removal and final colour vibrancy tweeks, with a final levels adjustment to shade the edge of Jupiter to enhance it's 3D globular appearance.

The session ran from just after 11pm BST on 26/10 to 2:30am BST on 27/10. Everything, including me, was wringing wet from dew and fog by the time I got indoors.....!!

Thanks for looking.

[Kon]

Excellent set of images. I am finding the around 10ms range to be giving me better results too even under so and so conditions. Less noisy.

[geoflewis]

1 minute ago, Kon said:

Excellent set of images. I am finding the around 10ms range to be giving me better results too even under so and so conditions. Less noisy.

Thanks Kostas, yes I think something in the 8ms -13ms capture speed seems to work best for me on Jupiter. I went faster with Mars last year, down at 3ms some of the time.

[Pete Presland]

Excellent set of images Geof