Jupiter 20151117
jupiter20151117-0950UTC
Best images to date!
Great morning. Outside at 04:30 EST, packed up before 05:30 EST
At the time it may not always seem like a good idea, but in reality, having another astronomer in the house to get oneself outside in the morning is a *very good idea*.
Kim did some visual observing of Jupiter, watched for Leonid meteors (not very many), and did some canon ELPH imaging of the waning planetary conjunction.
I did some more Jupiter imaging, this time a run of 9 (it was 10 but one was not very good), across 30 minutes… ie a new image every 3 minutes.
5ms exposures for 120 seconds, resulting in the 12000 frames + or – range.
then a 60 second wait and then another run.
This time I took the best 25% of the images for stacking and wavelet processing, then put the 9 images into an animated .GIF above.
Being so early in the morning, and the coffee was still perking… I forgot to turn on the debayer in the camera capture software (still not exactly sure how this affects the image).
The good news was, no condensation on the primary at all for the whole run!
Seeing was average-good as was transparency (average-good).
I judge seeing by how much the image bounces around my selected Region Of Interest (strictly qualitative) and transparency by the exposure needed to make the histogram hit 80%. The lower the better.
Just towards the end of the animation you can see the Great Red Spot appearing from the left hand side.
North is up, rotation is left to right.