gallery31 - jupiter

Gallery XXX - Jupiter, king of planets

1/31/04

As usual, seeing was not too good. I imaged Jupiter with the C14 at the Donald C. Martin Observatory at prime focus. I grabbed 2 minutes of video at 10 fps to yield 1200 frame video clips (AVIs). I made several runs at prime focus. Each was 2 minutes long. two were at an exposure of 1/100 sec, three at 1/50 sec, and one at 1/25 sec with an OIII filter in place. Images were captured with K3CCD using a Phillips ToUcam at 352x??? resolution (this was to save space on the hard drive). An IR blocking filter was used. images were processed with Registax 2. The wavelet and brightness controls were used to bring out detail. I pushed the lower number wavlets more this time but kept all at less then 4.5.

1/100 sec about 180 frames

1/50 sec about 380 frames

1/50 sec about 380 frames, same as at left but I played with color histogram in Registax, +5% red, -10% blue and green

1/50 sec, 400 frames,

1/50 sec, 400 frames, same as at left butdifferent wavlets, my best Jupiter to date

1/50 sec, 400 frames, my best Jupiter to date

clouds came in and altered color some, 1/50 sec

same as at left, different wavelets

with OIII filter, 1/25 sec, fewer frames

4/8/04

On 4/8/04 Justin and I returned to the dome at the Donald C. Martin Observatory to try our luck at imaging the planets. We were favored by clear weather and balmy temperatures (61f). We used the C14 and shot Jupiter and the other planets. only Jupiter was "high enough". The other planets were low and the sky was turbulent. I was impressed by how small Mars was and I began to realize how special last year was. We have trees close to the horizon so I didn't even try for Mercury. All night, Justin and I traded roles as dome, telescope, and computer operator. I usually did the localizing to get the planet on the CCD chip and then he took over from there. I did the final "tweaking" of camera settings. Jupiter was shot at 1/50 sec, though more gain was applied at 2.5x mag then at prime focus.

Jupiter 4-8-04

C14 at f25

Two different runs with a Phillips ToUCam, 14" Celestron SCT, 2.5x powermate, 300 of 600 frames stacked with Registax 2, quality level 90%, for the image on the left red +5%, blue+5%, green -5%, For the other two, the Hue was boosted a little, mild downwards gamma stretch. Images were then shrunk 50% after being rotated to put south at the image bottom.

Below are two runs shown at full image size. These were captured at 640x480 resolution. Note that at full image size the noise from the wavelets is more apparent.

C14 at f 10

This is a run of Jupiter at prime focus of the C14 with the ToUcam. These were processed in Registax 2 with 2x oversampling. The first image is the result after processing with wavelets. The middle image is the result of rotation. The final image has been rescaled to the "original size" that the image had before it was "2x oversampled".