Jup_20160326_025555_castr_g3_ap21r2.png-annotated

Very good imaging run last night (Friday 2016 March 25) of Jupiter with the 20cm f10 with x2 barlow, asi120mc camera.

The run went either side of Jupiter zenith, but the almost full moon was up interfering with transparency.
Seeing was good, transparency was good but getting worse.
Exposure was 33ms, runs were 90 seconds.
GRS was on the other side of the planet .. again! It’s been months since I’ve seen it.

Initially seeing was so good, I did not need to use software alignment. It was very steady. But software alignment is always a good plan so I used it the rest of the night.

After the initial 20 imaging runs, I switch capture software to the beta version, and that did not go well at all. After the next 20 I switch back to the stable version of firecapture.

The last few images were 120, 180 and 240 seconds. They actually turned out worse than the ones below as Jupiter itself rotates so much in that time that the features start to blur.
90 seconds seems to be the most with f20 imaging.

Another mistake was to install registax on a new computer. I tried to copy over the custom wavelet settings, but after processing all 42 runs, they were all horrible. Back to the original system, program and settings and they all turned out very well.

Below is the animated .GIG of the run from start to finish, 02:20 to 04:12 UT
.GIFs only show 256 colours but it does not seem to matter too much. The .MPG file is heavily compressed and animated but I can’t figure out how to introduce a slower playback FPS so one can actually see changes better.

jupiter20160326_0412