Jupiter & Io 08-14-22

I’m still finishing up processing images from imaging sessions in August. Here’s a Jupiter animation captured on August 14^th. Full details below.

Jupiter & Io August 14, 2022 — Jupiter on August 14, 2022. The moving dark spot is the shadow of Jupiter’s moon Io. Io is the moving orange dot. This time-lapse covers an 81-minute period.

For this session, I added a 0.5-inch (12.7 mm) spacer between the Barlow lens and the imaging sensor. This added a bit of extra focal length to the scope-camera system and raised the f-ratio from its usual f/18-19 to f/23. Adding the spacer this way effectively converted the Barlow Lens from 2x to 2.5x. Fortunately the seeing was good enough to handle the increase. The picture below shows the configuration.

The Orion Shorty 2x Barlow Lens with the 0.5 inch spacer inserted between the lens tube and lens housing. This configuration increased the distance between the camera sensor and the lens thereby raising the f-ratio of the entire telescope-camera imaging system from approximately f/18 to f/23.

Animation Details:

August 14, 2022 09:11:24-10:32:04 UT
81-minute time-lapse
North is up
Seeing: Fair-Good
Celestron C8 (203mm SCT f/10) + Orion 2x Shorty Barlow + 12.7mm spacer (f/23)
ZWO ASI224MC with IR Cut Filter
29 image animation sequence. Each image is stack of best 3000/10000 frames
FPS (avg) 63, 15.83 ms, gain 240, ROI 680×348, histogram 58%

Jupiter & Io 08-14-22

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