My Jupiter effort

[Kenny]

Ok, so, nowhere near the quality of some of the other images of Jupiter on the forum, particularly not the one this week by Duncan, however, this one is mine, done my my own fair hand, on the limited equipment I have access to.

I've wasted invested a day faffing around processing this data to get some results from it. But thank you very much to Duncan for sending me extensive instuctions on how to do the image processing.

Friday 30th Jan, 9:34pm. Orpington.

Celestron NexImage solar system imager CCD camera with x2 Barlow lens.
6" Newtonian on the OAS HEQ5 tracking mount.
9 x 120 second videos at 10 minute intervals.
Planetary Imaging PreProcessor to select the best 1200 frames from each video.
AutoStakkert2 @ 100% to stack each PIPP avi into a TIFF image.
Rotated in LightZone.
Aligned, rotated and animated in GIMP 2.

p.s. yes, more processing would have better aligned the lighting / contrast but I really have had enough of this one set of data now!

One still.



Animation.

[MarkH]

Well done Kenny, much better  than my best effort of the moon so far.

[The Thing]

That is really good Kenny! Compared to my first effort it's a masterpiece.

I've sent you some info on aligning, unfortunately the best software for this is also the most apparently complicated, WinJUPOS. But you would end up with perfectly horizontally aligned Jupiters for your animation.

[Carole]

Well done Kenny, better than my first efforts. 

Carole

[ApophisAstros]

impressive kenny, like to see your kit in action!!!

roger

[RobertM]

Quite impressive for a first outing that Kenny !!!

Robert

[Kenny]

Thanks all. A long way to go but these stills are much better than my first ones that I posted before Christmas, and getting to the point where I could put a sequence together as an animation was an enormous learning curve over the last couple of days.

[Ivor]

Well done Kenny certainly better than anything I've managed, could we all get a look at those processing instructions please!!

[doug]

Very well done, Kenny. You really are SMOKIN`....

Doug.

[Mike]

Nice

[The Thing]

Well done Kenny certainly better than anything I've managed, could we all get a look at those processing instructions please!!

This was written to help Kenny with doing Jupiter animations.

If I am using my colour Phillips SPPC900NC webcam I use SharpCap for capture.
I then use a progam called PIPP. This processes AVIs and is designed to chop off all the blank space and centre the planet (usually) to create a much smaller AVI, it also dumps a percentage of the worst frames. Typically if I capture 60s at 10fps in SharpCap I get a 1Gb file(!!!!!!) so for the animation that's 25Gb. PIPP cuts that to ~35Mb per file using lossless compression which is a vast saving. So I end up with a small AVI of good frames with static subjects.

These then go into AutoStakkert2! which can process them all at once if they are similar though this isn't obvious. Simply select them all, Analyse, set up the first which is displayed then Stack.
Then run the output files through Registax for wavelet sharpening. Read this by Christophe Pellier. When you have the first image sorted in Registax check Hold Wavelets so it remembers when you load the next. Select, Do All, then Save should be all you need to do after that. Then load the frames into JASC Animation Studio (easy) and use the wizard.

If I use my QHY5L-II mono I can use FireCapture which is brilliant and free but not stable with a Phillips webcam in my experience (very old drivers). It should work with your camera. FireCapture does a lot of what PIPP does to the AVI as it captures, crops (and vastly more) and allows you to guide on the planet as well ensuring a stable object position. I will use this more if I buy a filter wheel and some RGB filters.

All this software is free so get it and spend some time looking around. There are always tutorials and videos on the web as well.

Rotaing the images: Didn't have to as I was using an equatorial mount. Once I've got the camera set to the angle I want it's constant.

In Autostakkert there is an Advanced menu/Experimental function to derotate. Looks fiddly to set up but read the text as it may be easier than it looks. I think you can click in the video preview pane to set the angle. The primary function of this is to derotate frames in the video to compensate for rotation as you are recording that AVI hence some of the settings. If you are doing many AVIs and each has a different rotation then you will have to process them individually.

PIPP will only rotate in 90deg increments. Probably as its outputting another video.

Registax will rotate freely, you can even specify the centre to rotate around. If you have different rotations for a set of images and are trying to align them all it would be very fiddly.

WinJUPOS might be best at this, but its scary at first sight. In practice it's not so bad. Use the Image Measurement screen and read online tutorials/YouTube. You set up the planet outline, there is an automatic function that does a good job, then tell it you want the planet hozizontal... A gotcha is you need to put in an observer code on the form - anything short will do, I used my initials - or you can't save the image! If you get the hang of this you can then have a go at actual de-rotation to compensate for Jupiters (or other planets) rotation.

Hope that helps.