I haven’t been able to do any planetary imaging for over a year, but was finally able to get to Jupiter this week. Two animations follow.
I’ve also included a several-second snippet from one of the raw video sequences to illustrate the seeing conditions.
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A 45-minute time-lapse animation of Jupiter on November 23, 2023. The Great Red Spot is just about to rotate out of view. |
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A 38-minute animation picking up with the last frame of the animation above. In this animation, the Great Red Spot rotates out of view, and a disturbed region of the North Equatorial Belt transits Jupiter’s central meridian. |
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The seeing during this session was poor to fair with some improvement toward the end. This is a several-second snippet of one of the video sequences captured during the session. This was the view at the telescope and shows a wobbly undulating Jupiter with large scale features visible, but no fine details even for brief intervals. See Damian Peach’s “A Modern Scale of Astronomical Seeing for Imagers.“ |
Observing Details:
November 23, 2023
Animation 1: 01:16:23-02:00:29 UT
Animation 2: 02:00:29-02:38:15 UT
Seeing: Poor-Fair
Transparency: Good
Location: Edmond, Oklahoma USA
Image Details:
Animation 1 consists of 14 images. Animation 2 consists of 12 images. Each image is a stack of the best 3000 of 10000 frames.
Each frame 10.07 ms ; Gain 295
Equipment:
Telescope: Celestron C8 (203 mm f/10) operating at f/20 with 2X Barlow lens
Camera: ZWO ASI224MC with UV/IR cut filter
Mount: Meade LXD75 (under renovation)
Capture:
FireCapture
Processing:
Autostakkert3
Registax
GIMP