Jupiter in bad seeing - imaging experiment

[brianb]

Jupiter was nicely placed in a more or less transparent sky last night and I couldn't resist imaging it. Waited 3 hours for the scope to cool down, the image was still very turbulent, waited another hour and it wasn't improving. The wind was being a nuisance too, bouncing the planet around the chip and causing some frames which might have escaped the worst effects of the unstable air to be blurred by vibration. I knew that the results were not going to be great but decided to have a go anyway.

Ran off two sets of movies, results as follows:

A.

B.

Conditions & processing pretty much the same. The main difference here (apart from the rotation of the planet and Io, which is just off the east limb in the first set and just on the disc in the second) is that the R, G & B movies in the first set were exposed at 1/30 sec with moderate gain, and in the second at 1/60 sec with high gain. The IR movies were both exposed at 1/30 sec as there was insufficient gain to expose it properly at 1/60 sec.

There definitely seems to be more detail in the 1/60 sec images, even though they're compromised by having to apply heavy noise reduction. Except for the IR images, where the "A" image is better - but capture conditions were identical, apart from fluctuations in the seeing ...

... So ... not great images, but an interesting experiment?

After completing this set I switched to my little 110mm apo refractor and got results which I was pleased with, see my other thread ... the CPC1100 images do have more detail, but it's marginal rather than gross ... the difference here is that the CPC works much better than this when conditions are steadier, whereas the FLT images are pretty well resolution limited by aperture despite the seeing conditions.