Jupiter Animation 13-09-2008

Press the ‘Download’ button to the right to see the animation.

I’m pretty certain that this is my best animation of Jupiter to date. I was rather lucky tonight in that the sky was cloud free and there happened to be an Io/Io shadow transit. So I thought it might be a good opportunity to get out under the stars and try another animation. Unfortunately, the seeing wasn’t too good (and progressively got worse) but it was still fairly good for the magnification I was operating at.

So for details – this animation is made up of 11 frames, each taken 5 minutes apart (from about 6:40pm – 7:35pm) making it a total time length of 55 minutes – about 10% of a full rotation of Jupiter. The images were taken at about 400X magnification. I then doubled the size of each image after processing to get the image scale you see here.

Unfortunately, this animation could have been a fair bit longer. I originally planned to go until either Jupiter fell behind the trees (which would have been another two or so hours) or until my hard drive filled up. Based on how much space these AVI files took up I could have taken another three hours worth or so. However, I messed up a tad when Jupiter crossed its maximum altitude point – the telescope was bending over backwards (it’s hard to explain without a diagram) and the end of it eventually came into contact with one of the tripod legs. Obviously, this prevented it from tracking the planet any further as it had no more room to move. I could have just swung the telescope around so it would be facing the ‘other way’ (again, it’s hard to explain) but I would have lost Jupiter in the camera FOV which would have been rather hard to re-find again using only the finderscope. I would have had to have done all of that within five minutes. I’ll think up a better system for next time.

Each individual AVI was taken using a DMK21AU04.AS camera with a 2X Barlow lens attached to a 10” Newtonian reflector telescope on an EQ6 mount. Each file was processed with Registax, cropped and centered using PCFE and finally animated together using Animator9.