Contains:  Solar system body or event
Jupiter 9-29-2021 at approx. 4 hr UTC, Steve Lantz

Jupiter 9-29-2021 at approx. 4 hr UTC

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

I went after Jupiter again and was able to record 16 15-s videos at about 60 fps and exposures of 13 ms.  This yielded a total of 14,400 frames.  Based on much appreciated suggestions by Mike Feigenbaum, I decided to use more frames from each video in AutoStakkert to improve signal to noise (at the risk of including bad frames of course).  Based on analysis curves I decided to go with 400 frames because the seeing was decent.  Of course, two glitches happened that interfered with this attempt:  1) I must have bumped the camera cable because the camera rotated in the eyepiece holder and so my field was suddenly rotated about halfway through the runs and 2) I discovered that I need a new laptop because my hand-me-down Surface Pro, with 50 % space on the hard drive ran out of disk space after only 16 videos.  The field rotation really complicated the image processing.  And I had to eliminate 6 videos for various reasons related to quality.  I ended up rotating stacked images (ten from a total of 4000 video frames) by hand.  If anyone knows of software that could do this automatically, I would love to know about it!  Then I de-rotated the planetary disks using WinJUPOS and processed from there.  I found that the greater number of video frames stacked for each video, the more natural looking the stacked image turned out to be.  I also think that a 2x Barlow wasn't giving me enough resolution to capture fine detail and if I get another chance, I'll use a 3X focal extender that I have.

I took note of the interesting appearance of the Great Red Spot -- it looks like a rock in a river around which water is rapidly flowing, which results in a rather large boundary layer between the rock and the rest of the surrounding river.  Indeed, I found out that researchers have used Hubble images to discover that outer wind speeds in the GRS have increased some 8 % between 2009 and 2020 and now approach 400 mph (now that would be some hurricane!).  In addition, based on observations that go back to 1878, we know that the GRS has been steadily decreasing in size and becoming more circular in shape.

Comments

Histogram

Jupiter 9-29-2021 at approx. 4 hr UTC, Steve Lantz