Jupiter 2023Nov24
It was a busy busy Friday evening.. what with it being the only clear night for the next week or so.
The new ZWO miniscope was mounted to the Vixen scope and a ZWO ASI120 camera was mounted to it. It is a USB3 camera but I have only USB2 available to it. So it connected to a USB2 hub that also had connected to the usb-serial adapter for the mount and the usb focuser. Firecapture needed to be told to allow more than one instance and then restarted. It also needed to be installed again in a different location to get a 2nd camera up. It worked initially enough to find the moon and work on the miniscope to focus.
Once that was done however, any attempt at getting two cameras working failed. the miniscope camera failed to work.
I then started up sharpcap and tried to connect with it.. again.. no response.
All of this in lead up to Saturn transitting and Jupiter moon and shadow transits.
This is one of the best of 40+ imaging runs that ran from 18:00-21:36 … and it got too cold for me to continue. I had to stay outside as I was still trying to manage cables and get the finder camera working.
I’ve switched over from a x2 barlow to a x1.5 barlow, increasing exposure speed and contrast
2.3ms exposures help to compensate for seeing and air movement. This image shows the moon Ganymede off to the lower right, after completing its transfer. On Jupiter itself is the shadow of Ganymede, transitting at the bottom. Jupiter was 57 degrees in altitude but the very bright moon was very nearby, making transparency worse. This was the best 10% of 10K frames. The GRS also makes an appearance up and to the right of the moon shadow.
This was taken with firecapture and processed normally with autostakkert and registax.