Wednesday: Jupiter and Mars
Another nice night (Wednesday 2014 April 09) with relatively warm air, relatively clear skies to image under. We did the last benchmark runs with the Olivon (USB 1.1) camera on Jupiter and Mars and just started the next benchmark run with the Orion Starshoot camera (USB 2.0).
Sfter a lot of technical difficulties (drivers, computer locking up, computer crashing, orion software installing vveerryy sllowwly), It was up and running and did some imaging of Mars with a 2.5x barlow.
No surface details came up but again, not surprising as it was the first time this setup was run and I should have some better exposure control somewhere but have not yet found it.
Jupiters apparent diameter was 37 arcseconds, giving a field of view of 444×320 arcseconds wide by tall or 7.4×5.3 arcminutes wide by tall. It’s altitude in the sky ranged from 50 to 46 degrees (it was slowly setting into the west). Jupiter will be getting farther away from the zenith now and it encourages me to get out as early as possible to image it as high up in the sky as possible for better image quality.
Mars’ apparent diameter was 15 arcseconds, giving a field of view of 135×98 arcseconds wide by tall or 2.3×1.6 arcminutes wide by tall. It’s altitude in the sky ranged from 25 to 26 degrees (it was slowly rising from the east).
all pictures were recorded with handyavi as an .avi file, the processed with Registax v6.1 to align, limit, stack, wavelet processing.
Did not get a chance to image Jupiter with the Orion camera as it was behind the trees already.
The first thing i noticed was the much faster frames per second achieved. The Olivon camera got about 2.5 frames/sec. The Orion did an easy 10 frames/sec.
Makes for much better observing runs (less time sitting out in the cold!)
Friday night looks good and clear so watch out Jupiter! The papparatzi are coming!