Jupiter with Ganymede on its shoulder, Sept 4th

[Starman]

Another night of good seeing and an opportunity to catch giant Ganymede crossing Jupiter's disk. I'm still processing the transit images and this one was taken shortly after the transit ended. Some reasonable detail on Ganymede showing...

[frewi808]

Beautiful !!!

[johnh]

Ganymede is massive, splendid catch.

John.

[neil phillips]

Crackers galore this week, what a time for good seeing to hit the uk, with jupiter so big and bright, though still fairly low by best oppositions.

Very Nice Pete

[DarkerSky]

Simply astounding. One of the best Jupiter images I think I've ever seen. So much going on - and superbly captured detail on Ganymede. Fantastic stuff

[Starman]

Thanks for the comments.

Yes Neil, it's been a great week and left keep our fingers crossed for many more opportunities to come (although the forecast doesn't look promising ).

[moocher]

Another cracking capture Pete!!!! Amazing what amateurs can achieve nowadays with very modest (ahem) equipment. Trust me to miss out completely!!!

Alan:D

[Virgoman]

Absolutely stunning Pete. Love the detail on Ganymede! Superb stuff. A wonderful event to observe.How long was the capture sequence?

Best Regards,

Ralph:)

[Starman]

Thanks chaps.

Ralph - I'm not exactly sure what you mean. The individual captures are about 40s each, each filter swap and refocus taking as short a time as possible (normally between 5 and 15s I'd guess). If you meant the whole capture sequence from start to finish, I'd have to check but I've got Ganymede from before it hit the central meridian through to the point where it was separated from the planet. Amazingly, the moon changes its appearance quite significantly as it passes across Jupiter. When it's in the brighter middle bit, it appears very dark and easy to spot. As it heads closer to the shaded limb, it's appearance in RGB at least, becomes much less pronounced.

[resonator77]

excellent image Pete,

I am still waiting for your post processing secret

[Starman]

Damian's response to this question is that he waves pheonix feathers over his keyboard In all seriousness, there is no secret at all - it's down to having the scope correctly collimated, correctly cooled and the seeing being good. When all of these factors come together, there's little post processing to do - the results virtually fall into place.

When these things don't fall into place then it's possible to up the ante by adding luminance channels etc. with the result that the final image's colour is skewed somewhat but at least you'll have some added sharpness to the image. For the result above, the images have been sent through Registax, aligned in Photoshop and the levels, curves adjusted to produce the end result. A bit of unsharp masking has been applied to sharpen things up, but there's little more to it than that.

[perpetual dan]

Very nice. If I shrink the image and squint I get it down to the level of detail I sketched from my little scope (although my view was just before not just after transit)

[lukebl]

Phenomenal image!

[Virgoman]

Thanks for the reply Pete. It was the individual capture time that I was interested in. A very striking image, with a wonderful sense of scale.

Best Regards,

Ralph

[AztecastroMcJ]

great shot