Jupiter
On the night of Monday December 12th, I was outside setting up for an imaging run of Jupiter and totally missed the Selwyn fireball event! It would have been behind me and in the trees and maybe even behind the house. In any event the imaging run of Jupiter ran from Monday /Tuesday 2011 Dec 12/13 Starting around 23:00UT and ending around 02:00UT) (that’s 6pm EST to 9pm EST).
The setup is an lx200 f-ratio=10 FL=2000mm, using the meade lpi camera (640×480 pixels).
Each of the 22 images is composed of approx 100 exposures automatically combined by the meade lpi camera software.
The images were manually cropped down to 120×120 pixels.
Jupiter itself comes out around 60 pixels across.
The images were flipped vertically (using acdsee photo manager v9 in a batch edit operation) to (hopefully) give accurate representation of actual orientation and movement through a schmidt-cass optical system and a 90degree eyepiece adapter and the camera itself.
Jupiter appears to be rotating left to right with the dark storm spots on the upper side.
Checking with the stellarium software, this appears correct.
Imagemagick convert (linux software) was used to combine the 22 images into one animated .gif
More lessons learned:
During the end of the run, the scope was pointed much higher in altitude and there was fog and frost on the corrector plate… still need more power! on the heating system, even with a dew shield.
The corrector plate heater is rated at 12 watts (@12vdc=1 amp). The telrad heater pad is 6 watts, both running at a 90% duty cycle. This totals 18 watts give or take (or 1.5amps) when the 110vac-12vdc power supply is only good for 1 amp!
I varied the exposure time around the base of 0.044 seconds by +- 0.015 seconds, just to see if features would come out better or worse. In an animated image, this is a bad thing as the exposure variances really pop out.
Note the change in angle of the plane of jupiter during the course of the 3-4 hours or so of the run. Finding software to correct for small degree amounts may be difficult, especially without a time reference.
More pixels would be nice for more detail. I tried the barlow previously and you do lose a stop in light but you also lose sharpness, contrast as well. On the plus side you do get a bigger image on the ccd chip, more pixels.
Will try that again for another nights run… when it gets clear!