We stayed up on a crisp, clear night until the dazzling Jupiter rose high in the South at our observatory. We put our cameras on the 20" scope and spent ages tweaking focus and getting sequences of shots. I settled on covering the scope with an 8" mask, positioned at the lower end of the aperture to minimse the seeing distortions. This helps by matching the aperture scale with that of the atmospheric turbulent cells. We got a dimmer, but much sharper picture. I grabbed forty 1/50" exposures using a 2x barlow on this set up, to give an overall focal length of 4.8m at 0.2m aperture = f/24. I used large jpeg format on the Canon EOS 1000D(mod). I stacked 39 in Registax and upon wavelet sharpening, it revealed this wonderful detail. I had some trouble using Registax that wasted many hours, but I got there. Still, I didn't manage to select only the best quality pictures, so all got stacked. The highlight of this night was peering into the eyepiece and seeing the sharpness of the storms, belts, the light pink GRS, and best of all... the moons appeared as sharp disks! I was blown away!
Wednesday 5 October 2011
By Jove!
We stayed up on a crisp, clear night until the dazzling Jupiter rose high in the South at our observatory. We put our cameras on the 20" scope and spent ages tweaking focus and getting sequences of shots. I settled on covering the scope with an 8" mask, positioned at the lower end of the aperture to minimse the seeing distortions. This helps by matching the aperture scale with that of the atmospheric turbulent cells. We got a dimmer, but much sharper picture. I grabbed forty 1/50" exposures using a 2x barlow on this set up, to give an overall focal length of 4.8m at 0.2m aperture = f/24. I used large jpeg format on the Canon EOS 1000D(mod). I stacked 39 in Registax and upon wavelet sharpening, it revealed this wonderful detail. I had some trouble using Registax that wasted many hours, but I got there. Still, I didn't manage to select only the best quality pictures, so all got stacked. The highlight of this night was peering into the eyepiece and seeing the sharpness of the storms, belts, the light pink GRS, and best of all... the moons appeared as sharp disks! I was blown away!
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