Orpington Astronomical Society

Astronomy => Astrophotography => Topic started by: MarkS on Sep 04, 2010, 16:19:02

Title: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: MarkS on Sep 04, 2010, 16:19:02
I took 6 hours of video at 5 fps last night from 23:00 BST to 5:00BST - 45Gbytes in total.

Philips SPC900 webcam on Celestron C11 with x2 Barlow.
This animation is 24 frames and covers the first 80minutes of that 6 hours.  Each animation frame was created from 1000 original frames stacked in Registax.  I took a quick a dirty approach, stacking the frames in 10's first, which means that the final animation frames are not as sharp and detailed as they could have been - the seeing was not so good either.

Warning - this is 1.7Mbytes
http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/2010/jupanimation3sep2010.gif

Unfortunately, as Jupiter climbed into the sky, it became brighter and the core began to burn out, which is very annoying but I'll know better for next time!


Mark
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: mickw on Sep 04, 2010, 16:39:43
I hate you  ;)
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: Mac on Sep 04, 2010, 17:04:15
QuoteWarning - this is 1.7Mbytes

Is that supposed to be big?

Had it said 17M or 170M then that would have probably needed a warning, but not 1.7 Meg.

Excellent Animation though.

Mac.
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: mickw on Sep 04, 2010, 17:11:18
Very nice work on Jupiter in the last couple of days Mark.

All with a webcam and none of your really fancy kit.

With a little/lot of effort, anyone could do it.  Thanks for demonstrating that  :)

Mick
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: MarkS on Sep 04, 2010, 19:02:38
Quote from: mickw
With a little/lot of effort, anyone could do it.  Thanks for demonstrating that  :)

That's right Mick - the trick is to choose nights with good seeing - then a humble webcam can produce fantastic results for planetary/lunar imaging - the only limitation is the scope aperture.

I'm working on a complete re-processing of last night's data.  Version 2 of the animation will be much better ...
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: PhilB on Sep 05, 2010, 07:17:42
Beautiful animation, Mark. I bet the  tweaked version will be spectacular.

I know it's a lot of work, but how much of the full sequence are you eventually hoping to animate?
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: MarkS on Sep 05, 2010, 09:03:17

I'm up to 3 hours of animation now in my complete re-process from scratch - some of these later frames have excellent seeing and would make worthwhile images in their own right.

Mark
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: The Thing on Sep 05, 2010, 11:30:21
That's amazing. Well done Mark, you must have incredible patience.
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: MarkS on Sep 05, 2010, 12:53:19
Quote from: The Thing
That's amazing. Well done Mark, you must have incredible patience.

Some would call it obsessiveness!

I've got a 6 hour 45Gbyte AVI file recorded by VirtualDub onto an external hard drive (no free disk space on my laptop).

Using VirtualDub I've now chopped this into segments of 1000 frames (200 sec).

Each segment is now being processed in Registax.

Then each frame will be combined into a movie.

Actually, I think it might even be called insanity ...

Mark
Title: Re: Animation of Jupiter with Ganymede 3 September
Post by: The Thing on Sep 05, 2010, 14:52:27
Shame Registax can't be set to do the chopping up. Maybe a note to the authors?