Jupiter Tonight
Published on 7 May 2005 at 1:10 am.
1 Comment.
Filed under Images, Observation Log.
I took the scope out tonight as it was a clear sky and moderately humid (which is less than the usual VERY humid). I tried some different shots of Jupiter tonight with both the Olympus D460 and the Meade LPI. My results were pretty much what they’ve been. I’m either at the limit of my scope or the atmosphere… of course I could just have no clue what I’m doing! The seeing was probably as good as it’s ever been here. There seemed to be very little atmospheric turbulence.
At any rate, here’s the D460 shot which is actually a stack of 5 different “exposures.” Exposures is in quotes because the D460 offers very little manual control over the camera so I use the term loosely.
Here is the first stack I processed from the LPI. This is an average of about 40 frames (I always forget to look and see exactly how many). The Great Red Spot is faintly visible in the lower center of the disk.
click for larger
The single biggest problem I continue to have with all this exposure and focus. I’m either working through a LCD display on the back of a camera or my iBook (gamma set to red screen). In either case it’s almost impossible to be sure I’ve got the best focus and totally impossible to preview the exposure.
What? … people did this with film?!?!? Oh the woes of modern technology.
Dirty Skies - Experiences in Urban Backyard Astronomy » Jupiter Revisited on 16 Nov 2005 at 2:09 am: 1
[...] Below is an image of Jupiter from my observation run with the Meade LPI on May 6th. I used Lynkeos for the stacking in this instance (see the Software sidebar to the right) averaging about 100 frames. I did some post tweaking in Adobe Photoshop. If you compare this to my earlier image processing attempt (Jupiter Tonight) for this run, you will see I was able to tease out much more contrast and detail here. You will also see I mislabeled the moons in my earlier work as well! DOH! [...]