Another morning of poor seeing (Pickering ~4), as can be seen in the Capella star test. Quite amazing, that reasonable planetary and lunar imaging results can still be achieved under poor seeing conditions with modern cameras, larger telescopes and data processing methods, especially when compared to my first Jupiter image, captured in 1994 with a cheap 2" refractor and camcorder. The LRGB image again shows the GRS. Beside the LRGB data, I was only able to capture some IR data due to the formation of fog. For processing the RGB data, I used the LRGB approach by Damian Peach, which is described in much more detail in his 10 part tutorial series Jupiter from Barbados - Complete Workflow. The poor seeing conditions required some stronger wavelet sharpening, which can be easily achieved by increasing the step increment to 2.

Original: LRGB image (03:21 UT)
Revision B: IR image (03:29 UT)

If you want to process the data yourself, I uploaded the raw stacks straight out of AS!3 here.

09.09.2023 (03:17 UT - 03:31 UT)

Celestron C14 Edge HD @ f=6650 mm (F/28), res = 0.09"/px
+ Celestron CGE Pro mount
+ Celestron EF
+ ZWO ASI 290 MM
+ Baader 2x VIP Barlow
+ ZWO EFW
+ Astronomik RGB filter
+ Baader IR (685 nm) filter
+ Baader CH4 (889 nm) filter
+ Tempest Cooler
+ Omegon Dew Heater
+ Astrozap Dew Shield for C 14

Very short imaging train: I simply screwed the Baader VIP Barlow into the nose piece of the ZWO EFW. However, the small pixel size of the ZWO ASI 290 MM leads to a pixel scale of 0.09"/px at a reasonable f-ratio of f/28.

R: 1 x SER movie
G: 9 x SER movies
B: 3 x SER movies
IR: 6 x SER movies
5000 frames/movie
1x1 bin

recorded with Firecapture

Jupiter 50° above the horizon
Seeing: Pickering 4 (poor)

Postprocessing

IRRGB

Autostakkert!3:
- Stacking 60% of the frames/movie (IRRGB)
- Image Stabilization Planet
- Quality Estimator: Laplace, Noise Robust 5, Local
- Reference Frame: Autosize
- Normalize Stack 90%
- Minimum AP size = 104, Min Bright = 45, Multi-Scale

Registax:
wavelet sharpening using layer 2 & 3, step increment = 2, contrast= 95

Photoshop CS2:
- increase image size by 160 % using bicubic interpolation (smooth)

LRGB image

WinJUPOS:
- image measurement of RGB images
- image de-rotation of all RGB images into one luminance image
- image de-rotation of 2xB images into one B master image
- RGB image de-rotation of R,G and B master image into RGB image

Photoshop CS2:
- apply unsharp mask to lum image
- despeckle lum image
- apply unsharp mask to RGB image
- despeckle RGB image
- color correction of RGB image
- color desaturation of the blue and red colors at the planetars limbs
- increase color saturation of RGB image

Topaz Denoise 6:
noise reduction of RGB and lum image

Photoshop CS2:
- combine lum and RGB image into LRGB
- local sharpening of features of features in the polar regions and STB using unsharp mask
- darkening of the background

IR image

WinJUPOS:
- image measurement of IR images
- image de-rotation of 5xIR images into one IR master image

Photoshop CS2:
- apply unsharp mask to IR image
- despeckle IR image

Topaz Denoise 6:
noise reduction of IR image

Schwentinental (Germany)

-CS Daniel