Jupiter 20160106 approx 10:00 UT
Jupiter 20160106 10:00-1100 UT
Checked out the clear sky clock website and the newer “Clear Outside” android app last night, for this morning and forecasts were good.
So up and outside at 04:30 this morn to -8C and a slight wind. As noted by others, walking on the top sheet of glare ice over the snow on the way to the observatory was challenging and tricky.
Got out, opened the roof, turned on the power.. and remembered that I had taken the mount hand controller into the house to keep warm, a week ago.
Back through the icefield twice more.
Plugged in, did a fresh high magnification (actually I used the camera) two star alignment on Regulus and Arcturus and then went to Jupiter.
Seeing was average to good, transparency was average.
Started imaging runs of 90 sec, with 30ms exposures and was getting about 30frames/second with firecapture 2.4.12 (not the newer betas.. having some freezing issues with it).
LX200GPS 20cm f10 with x2 celestron barlow and zwo asi 120mc camera, connected to a 8 year old win7 laptop connected to the gigabit network and saving files directly into the house server.
The laptop display, on powerup, displayed some scary “frozen noise lines” but they cleared up in a few seconds… may have to start storing the laptop in a heated box …
Started the imaging runs… hard to focus as always. Tried to focus on Io as best as possible.
Tracking was not great. Could not hold Jupiter in the field of view for the whole 90 second run. 1 or 2 corrections during that time.
Tried to re-Sync after centering a few times but it did not seem to get any better.
Chalk it up to not a great pier (although the ground was frozen and the pier more stable than in the past), possibly meade gears and motors not liking the Great Cold North.
In between those times, tried to find Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina) on a line between Arcturus and Alkaid (handle of Big Dipper). Thought I may have seen a faint fuzzy, then the 10×50 binocs fogged over. Hmmph!
Took some tripod mounted Canon ELPH camera 15 second images of the moon and venus… very nice! Saturn just peaked above the treeline around 06:00.. just as a huge cloud bank came rolling in from the southwest.
Called it a day and went to find some coffee.
The processing routine was a little different this morning.
Since I did not change targets or Regions of Interest in the field of view of the software, Jupiter images stayed the same size (504×512 pixels) and I did not need to use Castrator to line them up and shrink the margins at all.
I then fired up Autostakkert! and loaded all of the 17? .avi files, and ran through the stacking sequence for the first one, then it did the rest while I went to work.
Analysis, alignment and stacking took about 10 minutes each . It converts the .avis into a single .tif image, using the best 10%, 25%, 50% and 75% of the individual frames.
This time I used the 25% bunch and ran each of the 17 .tifs through registax6 for wavelet processing (that takes about 20 seconds each). Looking through them I could see that although seeing stayed about the same, transparency went to hell in the latter half.
After that ran it through Linux imagemagick convert *.png jupiter.gif and jupiter.mpg to get the files attached here.
All in all only about 1 hour of images from start to finish.
After all that I discovered some configuration settings I forgot to fix on the filename side, leftover from the last session on Dec 26th.
Must change morning routine… coffee FIRST then outside to observe and image.
