Four hours of Jupiter's rotation, with a complete transit of the Great Red Spot (Paul Macklin)

Four hours of Jupiter's rotation, with a complete transit of the Great Red Spot

Revision title: Annotated composite image

Let me start by stating what is well known to us, but still pretty amazing: Jupiter's rotation is *fast*! It's pretty remarkable a planet with 11 times the diameter of Earth and 300 times the mass rotates in just under 10 hours. That's a lot of angular momentum! This makes imaging a challenge, but it's a wonder to behold.

For this project, I wanted to capture that rotation, with an emphasis on the Great Red Spot. Every 5 minutes from 1:30 am to 5:30 am, I recorded a 10000 frame 480p video (about one minute at 150+ FPS, 5ms exposures at gain ~350) with my 8" EdgeHD and a 1.25" PowerMate 2.5x. This generated over 150 GB of video to process!

Then, for each of these SER videos:
* Stack best 15% of the frames in Autostakkert (with 3x drizzle, RGB align)
* Wavelet sharpening in Registax
* Stretch contrast in Photoshop, gamma at 0.95
* Increase vibrance & saturation slightly (+20)
* Linear contrast curve
* Light Topaz denoising (denoise: 1%, sharpen: 10%, original details: 25%)
* Unsharp mask (225%, 5 px radius)

Over the course of the night, I got a little better at focus and ADC adjustment, which you can see in the "jump" in detail midway through. I'm pretty happy with my first serious Jupiter project. Thanks for exploring it with me!

Here are the "captions" for my images here:

A: Composite: Rotation in 30 minute increments from 1:30 am to 5:30 am.
B: Labeled
C: Detail: 3:45 am
D: detail: 4:05 am
E: Animation (50% resolution)
F: Animation (80% resolution, 20 MB)
G: Animation (Full resolution, 35 MB)

My registrax sharpening profile is attached: paul-jupiter-new2022-3x.rwv

B

Title: Annotated composite image

Description: This has the elapsed time labeled on each panel, to emphasize just how *quickly* Jupiter is rotating!

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Jupiter at 3:45 am

Description: One of the better captures at 3:45 am.

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: Jupiter at 4:05 am

Description: One of the better captures at 4:05 am

Uploaded: ...

E

Title: Animation - 50% resolution

Description: This is an animation of the whole four-hour sequence (51 frames), downsampled by 50% to keep the filesize under 10 MB.

Uploaded: ...

F

Title: Animation - full resolution (Warning: 20 MB)

Description: This is an animation of the whole four-hour sequence (51 frames), downsampled by 20% to keep the file size under 20 MB.

Uploaded: ...

G

Title: Animation - full resolution (Warning: 35 MB)

Description: This is an animation of the whole four-hour sequence (51 frames), at full 1920 x 1080 resolution

Uploaded: ...

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	n/a
Started	n/a
Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):