ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5
Jupiter 2019-05-27
Saturn 2019-05-27
ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5 – the usual.
Jupiter 2019-05-24
All with the usual gear: ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5
Saturn 2019-05-11
ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5
Jupiter – 2015-02-12, that great night
It was a great night. The best seeing and conditions I have ever recorded a planet, to date. And it was when Io cast its shadow onto Ganymede, making the moon go partially dark.
animgif
before
during
after
Jupiter-nostalgia, 2015-02-12
Perhaps the best seeing of my amateur astronomer life, Jupiter very high up on the sky, and Io eclipsing the Sun from Ganymede. With a … webcam, N 150/750 on an EQ3. Remember, jovial dance.
Jupiter’s family 2019-05-11
During this morning, Ganymede played hide and seek, emerging from Jupiter’s shadow, just to disappear again, behind Jupiter’s limb. I used my usual planetary setup, ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5 installed in my balconic-balcanic improvised observatory. The seeing was, this time, good to very good, with Saturn’s Cassini gap visible on the live view images, and Jupiter GRS also obvious on the live view. It’s mostly not the case, I must add. The moons are Io, Ganymede and Europa. Ganymede was part of the original recording (it was in the ROI selected for the planet), while Io and Europa are composited onto the image.
Saturn’s family, 2019-05-09
I dug out Saturn’s moons, from a longer expo series of images, and composited it with the lucky imaged Saturn. Below’s the process. There is also a random star photobombing the frame.
Saturn nostalgy 2014-06-27 reprocessed
I reprocessed an old image of mine, from 2014, recorded with a Scopium webcam, N150/750 on a motorized EQ3 mount.
Saturn, 2014-06-27
Saturn 2019-05-09, from 500k frames
I decided to do something desperate given the low altitude of the ringed planet. To make the seeing worse, I also happen to have a huge part of the city right under the southern sky, from my vantage point. One more thing, the rather unusually cold weather made many people to fire up their heating, which runs on natural gas and means many little chimneys contributing to an even worse seeing. So I decided to combine 500k frames recorded over the course of an hour or so and select the best 2k frames. The raw material that entered PIPP combined mode was 36 GB of SER files with the ROI of the ASI camera set to 240×160 pixels. Then came a very long processing, taking segments of the image from different parts and stages of the process – so bordering on painting the image based on the real images.
So the gear used: ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5 with a motorized focuser I hacked together. Location: Kolozsvár, Romania.
Software: SharpCap, PIPP (planet), AS!2 (surface), Registax and a photo editor.
