Jupiter 2021 December 22
The workflow process is slowly changing over time.
Now I tend to do a full view overexposed capture to establish orientation of the moons of Jupiter, to math it up with a naked eye orientation. Io is behind the planet, Europa and Ganymede to the left.
Next I am recording some quantative data about atmospherics… ie temperature, wind speed and direction and the clear sky chart seeing scale.
Temp= -3C
Windspeed 10kph gusting to 20kph from az 270 degrees
clearskychart seeing scale=1/5=bad
Next in the workflow process is a 30 second imaging run with no firecapture autoalignment, then a 30 second imaging run with firecapture autoalignment. This gives me a visual record of the seeing.
Then follows as many 180 second imaging runs as I can do. This particular afternoon, the wind gusts started to move the observatory on the tracks… so I stopped.
Once the files are transferred from the local laptop SSD drive (automatically scheduled), I run them through PIPP to crop and center down to 600×600 pixels, then through Autostakkert!3 to judge quality and stack in 5%, 10%, 25% best ofs. Usually I then run with the best 25% unless the quality scale indicates otherwise. 25% is a nice balance between throwing out the worst 75% of the images yet having enough data signal.noise to get a good final result.
Lastly the image is run through registax wavelet processing for sharpening.
This is the last image of the session, the best 25% of approx 8K frames, coming out of Autostakker.
This is the result after going through registax wavelet processing The results are amazing!
Lastly I run it through some linux scripts that annotate the image with its own filename, and other information.
The declination of Jupiter remains at record lows, but is increasing over the next decade or so. This means Jupiter will rise in altitude, giving better seeing as it goes.