Longer animation of Jupiter

[John_D]

This is an attempt at a longer animation of Jupiter and its moons. It's 30 frames, each produced from a 2 minute video and taken at 5 minute intervals. Ganymede then Europa pass in front of the planet followed by Io behind. Each frame is displayed for 200ms so it's 5 fps for 6 seconds.

The seeing was not good that night and, as can be seen from the video, varied quite a bit during the 2 hours that it took to capture the whole thing. Each frame of the video was processed in the same way and I could have gone back and done a bit more work on the slightly fuzzy frames. However the ultimate aim is to get even more frames to make a smoother animation and then it becomes more important to develop a largely automated process. Creating the 30 frames took about 2 hours of manual editing which was quite long enough for me! Of course with a higher fps each frame will be displayed for a shorter time so processing becomes relatively less important.

Video was captured using my 6" reflector, a 2x Barlow, an ASI120MC-S camera and ASIStudio running on a Linux laptop. Processing used PIPP, Autostackert3, Registax6 and GIMP.

Next I want to try and automate as much of the process as possible. ASIStudio can certainly do captures at regular intervals and PIPP has a batch mode, not sure about the rest.
 

[geoflewis]

Very nice animation

[John_D]

Thanks Geof.

[bosun21]

Nice animation 👍.

[PeterC65]

It might be possible to automate the time lapse capture process using the new planetary live stacking tool in SharpCap. I've created much shorter time lapse videos of Jupiter, just 10 minutes so far, but it's possible to record for longer and capture frames over longer intervals.

As your video shows, its a great way to get real perspective on the rotation of the planet and the moon transits.

 

[Kon]

Nice animation. The moons give it a nice depth.

[orion25]

Awesome, John

[John_D]

15 hours ago, PeterC65 said:

It might be possible to automate the time lapse capture process using the new planetary live stacking tool in SharpCap. I've created much shorter time lapse videos of Jupiter, just 10 minutes so far, but it's possible to record for longer and capture frames over longer intervals.

As your video shows, its a great way to get real perspective on the rotation of the planet and the moon transits.

 

Thanks, I haven't tried SharpCap because, according to Google at least, it doesn't run well with Wine on Linux. However all the posts about this seem to be a few years old so I'll have a look.

[John_D]

Thanks all for the encouraging words. Of course having posted an image to the forum I'm now in the mandatory week of cloud purgatory  Still it gives me time to look at the software,