Jupiter 20160312
The first nice clear, nottocold night in a long time… too bad I could not stay awake any longer than I did… the last images were the best!
Seeing was poor to average, transparency was average.
The imaging ran from 20:46 EST to 23:30 EST on March 11 or in UT 00:46 to 03:30 March 12.
The first images were the worst, due to the low altitude of 32 degrees above the horizon. At some point I will set a minimum level and not even bother to image below that because these images are mostly useless.
After each 90 second exposure, 210 seconds delay were introduced to get a 5 minute cycle.
The last image was at 51 degrees altitude and was the best of the run. If only I could have stayed up another 90 minutes… would have been great!
Again the equipment was a 20cm lx200gps f10 (2003) that I do not think is tracking very well. Will have to talk to others about it. The field of view was 512×512 pixels and Jupiter was 44 arcseconds large… so the scope drifted by 44 arcseconds? at times? You could not leave it for more than 30 seconds. And it did have two runaways where the exposure had to be stopped, the ROI increased back up to maximum 1280×960 to locate the planet and recentre it, then shrink the ROI back down and reexpose.
The image annotations were tweaked a little for this run. Image exposures ran from 46ms at the start to 33ms at the end, reflecting the atmospheric extinction. No Great Red Spot but there were some nice ovals in the south.
Focussing remains a huge challenge. After the first image run, I removed the camera, put in a 40mm eyepiece (4000/40=x100) and then a 20mm superplossl (4000/20=x200) and redid the coarse focus. Then the camera went in (slightly offset from before) and used the microfocuser and handyavi stepped numerical display to get the best focus I could estimate.