Jupiter, with Io - C8 EHD First (planetary-) Light - 20221226 2052

With the C8 ‘operational’ straight after the first setup, the first lunar-image quickly captured with the ASI174, the camera was switched for the ASI462MC, to focus on its ‘real’ purpose … planetary. The C8 is piggy-backed with the RedCat for ad-hoc plate-solving, fitted with the ASI183MC, and guiding, using an OAG with ASI120MM on the RedCat. I had some trouble getting the finder-scope aligned on the C8, but after about 2 hours of ‘trial and error’, I was finally ready to ‘search out and hunt for those elusive planets …

First planet in sight: Jupiter …

I was hoping to still have had the time to catch a glimpse of Saturn, Venus or Mercury ,,,, but the loss of time with the finder scope and a wrongly setting up of the back-focus of the ASI183 on the RedCat, made all three of them to be ‘out of reach’ for the night. It took some time before I figured our that the 5mm ring I had inserted in the imaging train wasn’t supposed to be there, compared to the original setup of 1 1/2 years ago. But, there will be a better chance at Venus and Mercury early next year anyway. And Saturn, hopefully we’ll have another chance as well in the next weeks, before it is getting really too low ,,,

I made several captures of Jupiter, with the native C8 focal length, Barlow 2x and Barlow 3x. Seeing on the night wasn’t too good, and getting worse as the night progressed. But this was my first chance, and maybe the only one for some time to come, given the weather.

Although the capturing went well and looked very promising, all B2x and B3x images seems ‘tainted’ by a dust spec in the imaging train, causing a serious artefact in the processing. Not sure how it got there in the middle of the night when switching the Barlows in/out (some learning to be more careful with that in the future)

This is the first image-stack of Jupiter I captured, straight from the C8, no Barlow … Seems ok as a first planetary capture

Frozen in time: 20221226 2052
C8 EHD, ASI462MM, UV/IR, EQ6-R Pro
240p, 4ms G200, 60s
AutoStakkert, PixInsight

I did try out stacking several images together using WinJupos, but that only gave me a marginal better result. The learning-target is that next time my 'base'-images of Jupiter need to improve ... fingers crossed

Clear Skies everybody! 🤩✨🔭

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