Jupiter 20160113 at 11:09:15 UTC
Saturn 20160113 at 11:15:42 UTC
Wow.. clear skies this morning… could not resist. tried not to look at the weather station before going out… good thing too.
coldest ever imaging session I have ever done.. to date. -14C. No wind as well around 05:45
The observatory roof was a little stuck, but pushed open easily once it started moving. A little bit of blown snow by one area of one door.
The laptop computer started up fine, no glitches. The hand controller was inside, plugged in and the telescope started up fine.
Pointing was good… Jupiter was within the 30′ inner circle of the Telrad. But it still took me 5 minutes of slewing around to get Jupiter in the camera field of view.
I completed 6 imaging runs in total, 60 and 90 sec runs at 30ms exposures, with the 20cm SC scope, x2 barlow and asi120mc camera.
Getting close to the time to close down and go to work, and noticed that Saturn had cleared the southeastern tree line.
So I also got the first two imaging runs of Saturn this season.
Good thing too because Jupiter is past zenith now when I get outside and is heading into the backyard trees.
seeing was poor, transparency was poor
Jupiter: 40.5″ diameter 43 deg altitude north is up. no Great Red Spot this morning. A few blue features just south of the north equatorial belt.
Saturn: 36.0″ diameter 10 deg altitude north is up. no surface features at all, some colour prism effect from the low altitude. no ring gaps seen.
All in all not good results today. go figure. Saturn will only be getting better, Jupiter only worse.
These images attached were created from the best 50%.
Processing steps:
firecapture to align target, use ROI for 512×512 to speed up data transfer, flipx, flipy, debayer settings on
castrator to reduce video size down to 400×400 pixels and to centre the target
autostakkert! used both standard and x1.5 drizzle to create .pngs
registax – used Jupiter wavelet settings on both Jupiter and Saturn. perhaps Saturn settings should be different.