Thursday, November 17, 2011

Latest Jupiter Image






Last Thursday I took my Skywatcher 80ED Pro into the garden to try to capture an image of Jupiter in all it's glory. It was a beautiful, clear evening and Jupiter had moved far enough from the almost full Moon. I have not taken a planetary image with this scope before using a webcam, so I wasn't sure about the focus settings. I remember having problems with this and had to mess about with it. Once I had the telescope set up and tracking I was able to set up the Philips Toucam Pro to get the image onto the centre of the CCD sensor. After taking a couple of avi videos using K3CCD I tried with the Barlow lens to make the image bigger. This is quite tricky, because it is usually hard to find the target and it needs to be dead centre. When I put in the Barlow lens I found Jupiter was aligned perfectly! The tracking was perfect as well, so I was able to capture up to 3000 frames of video without it moving.


After capturing Jupiter I then went inside, stacked and processed the image using Registax 3 and Photoshop.

In the larger image I can see a dark spot or shadow on the left of the surface. I am not sure if this is a Moon in transit or a storm in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The image was taken at about 8.30pm GMT on 10/11/11.


I am really pleased with this image, my best of Jupiter so far!

Friday, November 11, 2011

Swedish Moon







The Moon and Jupiter has been wonderful in Sweden and here are some lovely photos sent to me by Birgitta taken from Storvik which is North of Stockholm in Sweden. Birgitta has used a Canon Powershot A650IS to capture the images.



A beautiful image from Birgitta of the Moon and Jupiter seen from Sweden. Here in England it was cloudy, so we couldn't see this. The sky cleared the next day, but Jupiter had moved to the other side of the Moon.


I love this photo of the Moon....very spooky! Thank you Birgitta!