Jupiter 30 Dec 2014 03:49:51 from Beckenham

[The Thing]

I was wowed by this one! It was a really good night last night. I have made a GIF animation of 6 of these but Flickr doesn't like it .

Meade LX90 8" UHTC, Moonfish 2" x2 ED Barlow, Moonfish variable extension tube and t-mount adapter, Pierro Astro Astmospheric Dispersion Corrector, Phillips SPC900NC (in that order). PHD2 guided. Camera settings at bottom of post.
Captured @20fps in SharpCap. Firecapture would be used but it doesn't like the old Phillips webcam. PIPP cropped, quality selected and compressed (saves vast amount of disk space), Autostakkert! using Sigma Stacking option to remove dust bunnies, Registax to sharpen and tweak colour and curves. This is actual size as captured.



AS_p100_Multi_Jupiter 2014-12-30T03_49_51_ulrg_g3_ap36_RGSTX
by AstroDunc, on Flickr

(From Sharpcap)
[Philips SPC 900NC PC Camera]
Frame Divisor=1
Resolution=640x480
Frame Rate (fps)=20.00
Colour Space=YUY2
Exposure=-4
Brightness=64
Contrast=31
Saturation=0
Gamma=0
ColorEnable=255
BacklightCompensation=0
Gain=45

[JohnP]

wow - that looks even better - nice - John

[Mike]

Very nice Dunc.

[The Thing]

Thanks guys.

[RobertM]

Well I guess you answered my last question

That's even better plus the colours look more natural - you must be enjoying using the corrector.

Robert

[The Thing]

The corrector is great. I need a new monitor, the colours may be improved if I can see them! I have an old LED jobby on my desktop machine, it was once state of the art, now it's just a state  .

I have also developed a workflow that has consistent settings rather than tweaking each capture. I have found you can batch process similar AVIs in PIPP which does the cropping, object centering, dark frame substraction, quality selection and lossless compression (1GB -> 70kb!). Autostakkert! can then batch process the stacking with sigma clipping to remove the gunk, you can also get it to output different stack sizes all in the same run for comparison purposes. Registax can keep the wavelets and other settings between images, shame you can't batch that bit up as well, you just load an image, Registax does its thing,  then save it. I processed around 20GB of data in an hour this morning.

[The Thing]

The animated version! Gallery to the rescue.

[julian]

Very nice.

[Tony G]

Very nice Duncan and good to see the planets being imaged, and a nice animation. 

Tony G

[MarkS]

You're on a roll now Duncan.  That's a great Jupiter and I love the animation!

Mark

[The Thing]

The animation capture was done using SharpCap to capture 1 minute at 20 fps then wait 5 minutes. I set it to do a sequence of 6 as I thought I was running out of disk space (again). Since I was guiding with PHD I could be sure Jupiter would stay in frame.

Each 1 minute at 640x480 resolution is around 1GB of raw video data for those who want to try it. You only need a driven mount, a barlow and a webcam. You can guide manually with the handset on minimum speed.

[Kenny]

Great picture and animation. I want to have another go at Jupiter, not that I'm expecting anything like these results!

[Carole]

Some good detail coming through Duncan, I like the animation.

Carole