Contains:  Solar system body or event
First Attempt at Planetary Imaging with Jupiter and The Great Red Spot, Eddie Bagwell

First Attempt at Planetary Imaging with Jupiter and The Great Red Spot

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Here is my first attempt at Planetary Imaging. I took out the Starizona .63x corrector/filter drawer/camera from the SCT 2" nose adapter and added the new setup that included the Celestron 2x Barlow/ZWO ADC/ZWO 662mc.

Finding focus was the first obstacle as I had to add an additional 60mm of spacers in front of the Barlow to finally get there. The FOV with this setup is super small and Jupiter practically filled up the entire preview screen. SharpCap 4.1 has a new Planetary Tracking feature, but I couldn't get that to work but tracking was pretty good considering PhD2 was not used. I just had to nudge the mount a few times to keep Jupiter centered.

 I'm hoping to also try Live Stacking with the new optional Wavelet sliders for better results next time. They say the two most important things in Planetary Imaging is seeing and focus. Not sure if I had either of those working in my favor. Anyhow, I was able to record 10 SER videos of different Gains, Exposures, Resolutions and Frames to get a good mixture of captures.

This image/SER file was 4000 frames that took one minute and 50 seconds to record so I didn't have to use WinJupos to de-rotate the image. Jupiter rotates at a fast rate, and I could see the Great Red Spot coming into view as I worked on the project.

After processing the files about a dozen different ways, this is the best I could pull from the data. The ZWO 662mc is a color camera but this image (Original) lost some of the color along the way. Just glad to have something to post for the first time out and hopefully will get better with experience. 

Clear skies, Eddie

Update: After reprocessing Jupiter, Revision E seems to be a little better.

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