Hi Guys – here’s my latest attempt to image Jupiter. Equipment: Celestron C11 SCT with standard Starbright coatings; Losmandy G11 Gemini mount poorly polar aligned (I kept having to move the Dec and the R.A. some during imaging); Meade Lunar Planetary Imager through a 2” Televue dielectric diagonal; larger image taken using a Televue 2” 2x “Big Barlow”; and a borrowed notebook computer from work.

The smaller image is a combination of 203 images taken using Meade’s LPI software - image capture started at 11:19 p.m., PDT (California, USA time). The larger image is a combination of 395 images using the 2x Barlow - image capture started at 11:47 p.m., PDT. Both image sequences were fed into RegiStax 4.0 where each batch was aligned and stacked before adding moderate wavelet filtering. The larger image sequence was not as clear, basically because I had something set wrong during the LPI image acquisition (I think I had told it to apply edge detection or filtering after the 10th exposure, while I had that turned off for the smaller images). In one of the earliest acquisitions, I managed to capture one of the Jovian moons; however, I had the camera rotated 90° from the normal viewing angle for some reason, so that was the only image set that showed anything other than Jupiter itself. Unfortunately, Jupiter did not look as “good” as later images, so I decided not to show that one here. Final image processing and resizing were done in PhotoShop CS and Neat Image did a little clean-up filtering at the end.

The Celestron’s native focal length is 2800 mm at f/10. The LPI is (according to Meade’s website) “equivalent” to a 6 mm eyepiece. So, the smaller image comes out to be 467X; the larger image equates to 5600 mm at f/20, and 933X. Both of these are way beyond the seeing conditions and/or “maximum useful magnification” of the scope; however, by using an imager even as cheap as this one is, and by stacking several hundred images in RegiStax, the poor seeing conditions, atmospheric turbulence, etc. are minimized. Plus, it really helped by collimating the scope just moments before data acquisition on a nearby star (thank you, Bob’s Knobs)! Oh, one more thing – my “latest and greatest” addition to my arsenal is a Feather-Touch Micro focuser (10 to 1) which I added to the back of the C11 on Monday night. Man, is that one SMOOTH focuser! It also almost completely eliminated the image shift observed when changing the focusing direction with the factory focuser.

Comments, questions and critiques welcome!

Clear skies!

Paul

Attached Images

	Jupiter 2 - 203 images processed at 8_5_filtered.jpg (8.6 KB, 68 views)
	Jupiter 8 - 395 images processed at 8_5_filtered.jpg (16.7 KB, 84 views)

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Hi Paul these are some fine color shots of jupiter. The Onion skin effect is a pain i tried to notch the gama a bit on my photos and also a bit on brightness it gets rid of most during processing. Welldone! Clear Skies

Fantastic image. I love the detail and colors.
Also, congratulations on having it featured on Universe Today!

Phil

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If at first you fail, you're running average

hi Paul,

very nice jup-images.
colors are great in the larger image!
even though there is a slight artefact in the image coming from sharpening, it still is very nice!
have You tried neat image to get rid of the shrapening ringing artefacts?
http://www.neatimage.com/
there is free version/trial.

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best regards,
Dietmar
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www.stargazer-observatory.com

Hi Efrain, Phil and Dietmar - thanks for the comments - sorry to get back to you so late

Dietmar, I actually have Neat Image, and if memory serves me correctly, I had used it on both of these images. Perhaps I should have applied Neat Image a second time to smooth out the wrinkles some more.

Clear skies!

Paul

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Photons are free. Take some!

Very nice. Thanks for posting!

I'll never forget the first time I saw Jupiter with my 6-in Newt, way back in the 70s.