Jupiter from the 5th of December

[IDM]

Weather here hasn’t been good recently however, there was a brief window with a forecast of only moderate jet stream on the 5^th for me to try out some of the suggestions made by Geof and Kostas. These being:

 

1. Use of a barlow to move from F10 to F20, for better sampling (Camera has 3.75um Pixels so 18.75, probably optimal).

 

2. Increase my exposure from 5ms (typically 195 FPS) to 10ms.

 

3. Increase my histogram up to around 80-90%

 

I would like to say everything worked out however, I made the mistake of switching from Sharpcap to Firecapture. Now that shouldn’t be a problem other than I didn’t know there was a tick box in a camera sub menu for high speed capture! This meant that far from reaching 100FPS I only managed 50FPS on average. So far too slow to freeze the seeing! However, I carried on by taking 9 x 60 second videos between clouds. These I processed through PIPP, Autostakkert, Registax, Winjupos and finally Astrosurface to produce the image below. Now I know it’s not great but given the conditions and frame rate I feel it tells me that I am going in the right direction. Unfortunately we have had nothing but rain and snow since so have been unable to check out the higher frame rate capture to see if I can finally pull out more fine detail.

Thanks for looking 

Ian

[Kon]

Nice image Ian despite the Jetstream and software issues. You seem to have some details coming through even at the lower fps.

[IDM]

3 hours ago, Kon said:

Nice image Ian despite the Jetstream and software issues. You seem to have some details coming through even at the lower fps.

Thank you Kostas.

i am hoping that we get a weather window soon. 
Ian

[geoflewis]

Nicely done Ian. 50fps is still a decent capture rate, it wasn’t too many years ago when that would be considered fast 🙄and your processing is excellent.

[IDM]

4 hours ago, geoflewis said:

Nicely done Ian. 50fps is still a decent capture rate, it wasn’t too many years ago when that would be considered fast 🙄and your processing is excellent.

Thank you for the kind words. I have been trying to be more gentle with the sharpening. I noticed a comment you made about increasing colour saturation in Astrosurface. To my eye this really helps in 'lifting' the colours particulalry some of the blues.

Ian

[orion25]

Great image, Ian, especially considering the circumstances. You're definitely going in the right direction. I'm learning stuff all the time

 

Reggie

[IDM]

On 14/12/2023 at 22:32, orion25 said:

Great image, Ian, especially considering the circumstances. You're definitely going in the right direction. I'm learning stuff all the time

Thank you very much.