I was finally able to image Jupiter at about 4am Thursday, October 23, 2014 as the night skies were realtively crisp. The seeing conditions were light polluted as I set up in our apartment complex but the East sky was the best direction with the least LP. I set up the new Advanced VX mount & attached my Celestron 127 SLT Maksutov optical tube to it. My neighbor & fellow astronomer Steve Franks joined me at about 1:30am & we began viewing some double stars &a few Messier deep sky objects like M36 & M15. Probably the best view of the early morning was M42, the Orion Nebula. We were quite surprised as we switched out various eyepieces & Barlows, the nebulosity was surprisingly visible in that Mak! The Trapezium was spectacular, we were able to get diffraction pattern on the brightest of the four stars in that pattern. We used my eyepiece set consisting mainly of Celestron Omni Plossl & Steve supplied some great Agena, BST & Brandons to achieve good clarity on M42. I then moved my attention to Jupiter as it rose in the East around 4am, setting up my NexImage 5 camera. The view through the 32mm Omni eyepiece was rather bright & soft but bands & poles were indeed visible. The Gallilean Moons were positioned in a typical view. Callisto was to the right, Europa & Ganymede to the left with Io behind Jupiter according to my Stellarium mobile app. I made 22 videos total & was very impressed with the tracking on the AVX mount as I was using the 127 SLT GoTo mount before. The videos ranged from about 45 seconds to 2 1/2 minutes each using the Celestron iCap 2.3 software at 52 feet per second (fps). Gain was maxed out at 63 and the exposure varied around 1/35th. I then pre-processed the videos in PIPP (Planetary Imaging Pre Processor) to bring the total frame counts down from 3000-7000 frames to 1,200 frames that the final stacking software Registax 6.1 could handle. I processed the final image in Registax 6.1 using the Lowest Frame Quality of 0 then the typical adjustments to the wavelets, historagram, gamma, RGB balance & some slight denoising. I then did light touchup in the freeware photo processing software Irfanview. I resized the image to 800x600, sharpened it & applied my watermark. All in all, this first light of the AVX mount with the 127 SLT Mak optical tube was very satisfying, we were amazed at how well it worked for that first time. Looking forward to seeing the solar eclipse this evening with Steves 6 inch refractor & solar filters as I have yet to purchase any types of filters. Please check out & like Cargeena 2 Astronomy on Facebook for more great pictures plus current/future celstial events. https://facebook/Cargeena2Astronomy?ref=bookmarks
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 17:42:56 +0000
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