Surprisingly, it was “clear” again this morning, against all predictions from last evening.
Rolled outside around 05:15 EST to low level fog and -5C and a frozen stuck roll off observatory roof.
A little bit of grunting got that open. The laptop was still up and running well. On powerup the 20cm LX200GPS display displayed garbage and was unresponsive. Cycled the power and this time it came up “normal” but of course, since it was not “parked” on the last power up, it wanted to do a full blown alignment. I declined and told it to find Jupiter anyways. It was not too bad… within .5 degrees. Put in a low power eyepiece to centre jupiter and then the ASI 120MC camera again.
Only had time for three 120second runs this morning. The first was without firecapture’s “autoalign” feature, where it keeps the image centered whilst the real object is bouncing around. It makes the stacking process better later on. The 2nd and 3rd runs had it on but the tracking had issues on the 3rd run and it was discarded.
Seeing was surprising average as was transparency, as evidenced by a 40ms exposure time.
This is the best 50% of the 2965 frames taken with Jupiter at 28 degrees altitude. Even with realtime focussing looking iffy, I was hoping for good images because of the stability or the air. Subtle cloud variations came out in post processing, which was great.
There was/is a single moon in the image, to the upper right, which I used to focus on with a 200ms exposure (just to see it better).
Stellarium tells me this is Io, with the other three Galilean moons on the other side of Jupiter and further out of frame. No Great Red Spot is apparent.
FYI The Perijove of the spacecraft Juno is Scheduled for Sunday 2016 Dec 11. Any observations or better yet imaging around that time might be useful!