Jupiter 2022August28
This is the massive planet Jupiter in the early morning hours of Sunday 2022August28.
There are 39 usable runs of 180seconds each with a 120second delay between each, resulting in 12 runs an hour, so this is about 3 hours 15 minutes to watch the Great Red Spot traverse across the field of view.
Interestingly, Jupiter was before at and after its highest altitude, but the exposure had to change from 10ms to 35ms to keep the exposure relatively the same. There seemed to be a lot of bad transparency hanging out over Lake Ontario and affecting the Jupiter Imaging Session.
One of the changes in the last year was the use of an equatorial mount instead of an alt-az mount. During the course of the nights runs, you will not that Jupiter does not change its orientation, like it would with alt-az.
This is near peak altitude, which is still much better than years past! And opposition is coming up at the end of September. It is just shy of 45 degrees altitude in this selected mid run image, showing the GRS centered in the field of view.
The planet itself has an apparent diameter of a little more than 48 arc seconds.
This was a 180 second run resulting in 7567 frames captured, each at about 20ms. After processing the best 10%, 25% and 40%, I chose to further process only the best 10%.
The processing pipeline is: autostakkert!v3 for align, stacking and drizzling x1.5, registax v6 for wavelet processing, and Imagemagick for annotation by parsing the firecapture text log file.
I still hope to add another step or two afterward, perhaps some contrast and colour saturation.
Below is an animated .GIF for the 39 resulting imaging runs for the morning from 04:42 UTC to 07:53 UTC = 00:42 EDT to 03:53 EDT. This may have been my longest ever continuous imaging run of Jupiter.
