Jupiter 20160304
Jupiter 20160304
Friday evening 2016 March 4th, showed the firstclear sky promise in a long time.. with several days earlier this week promising but not delivering. Tonight it delivered. Was not to cloud over until 01:00 but the clouds came early… around 22:00
Another successful remote session, inside from the comfort of the fire.
37 runs of 60 and 90 seconds from around 20:00 to 22:22 EST with Jupiter barely clearing the horizon (maybe 20 deg altitude).
Tried to use a focussing mask (two hole) but that did not work out.
Tried to x5 the exposure and find a moon and focus on it.. that did not work out.
Ended up with a lot of back and forth focus on the preview image and did the best that I could.
This was the first night using the new, shorter dew shield (was running into the wall when slewing, probably still will just not as much). Nine year old Laptop with memory upgrades to 4GB and 240GB SSD as well. Saving images to local drive instead of across network. it worked as well! No USB glitches.
Jupiter was 44.4 arc seconds large, 2368 frames were captured and the best 25% were used to make this image. The original .avi filesize was 1.8GB
The captured Region of Interest was 516×512 pixels from the ZWO ASI 120MC max size of 1280×960.
Using a smaller ROI gives a faster Frames per Second and a smaller file size to content with.
Below is the animated .gif compilation of the nights image runs.
The seeing got better through the 2.5 hours, as Jupiter rose in the sky and we were looking through less air. Seeing and transparency were both poor. The Great Red Spot had just existed right and would not be back until well into the morning. one of these days I will get it on the front face again!