Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

The seeing was pretty great for our Fall’N’Stars 2014 star party. Two days of Clear and two nights of clear.
Pretty amazing… still talking about it weeks later.
In any event, the observing sessions were: stay up as long as you could in the evening (usually 23:00-23:30 or so), then get some sleep and get up before sunrise (04:00 -05:00). Jupiter happened to be in the morning sky so I took some images on our 20cm Dobsonian Scope (non tracking!), with the new ZWO ASI 120MC camera hooked into the old windows7 netbook computer running handyavi software.
The trick here is that the scope did not track the sky, so Jupiter quickly moves across the field of view.
So I took images that are stored as video files (.avi) maybe 20 or 30 seconds long at multiple frames per second, with exposures down well below 1/10 sec or so.

Replaying the video shows some nice surface detail on Jupiter, mainly the two main cloud belts. I then tried to process it with Registax v6 and this second image turned out. not bad but not great..

The first image above was processed with default setting with Autostakkert! 2 Much better results, some indication of real colour, primary and secondary cloud belts, and the moons really started to come out as well.

I continue to be impressed by the ASI 120MC camera and hope to start using the firecapture software instead of the more generic handyavi. Also to learn more about image processing after the fact.