Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

Another good morning of imaging of Jupiter, after some upgrades to the observatory were performed yesterday.
The roof guide rails were 2″x4″ x8′ and were replaced by 2″x3″. This prevented the roof from freezing and sticky in the morning -3C.
The corrector plate heater (10w) was replaced by a retail product, thinner and 20w of heating ability… and the existing broken power cable for it was done away with.
A dew shield was built for the telescope, consisting of a “krazy karpet” style soft plastic.
The 20cm diameter gives about pi*d or 63cm of circumference and used up the entire karpet. The dew shield was notched to slip back even further past the telrad base and still extends out 30+ cm (x1.5d recommended.

All of these modifications helped to image from around 05:13 EST until it got too bright from the sunrise twilight without any fogging of the corrector plate.
This encourage us to ramp up the exposure from 120 to 180 seconds.

The image above is the last of the morning, 14373 frames at 6ms exposure. Processed by autostakkert for the best 25% into a .tif then registax6 wavelets only. Jupiter was magnitude -1.85 with a diameter of 33.7″
The settings on registax are a little on the high side still, making this look too processed, too contrast enhanced. But it is a good three steps forward and one back for todays session. Future ones will only get better.

Also, there was an attempt to use firecaptures autorun feature, of 5 runs of 120sec each, but most of those failed due to poor tracking… Jupiter left the field of view.