Try increasing gamma if dark sections aren't distinguished

Try increasing gamma if dark sections aren't distinguished

Friday, June 26, 2015

planetary conjunctions: moon, venus, and late jupiter...saturn


After sunset on 6/21/15 there was a scenic arrangement of the crescent moon, venus, and jupiter--and it was clear (which has been problem here in June).  Though too wide to be captured in a telescope, I decided to turn my new mono planetary camera on the subjects. 


venus gave her usual inscrutable crescent:





Though very low in the sky I was able to get some detail on jupiter and lucky enough to catch the great red spot:


and the moon...well it's really big.  the widest field my planetary rig could manage was just a small section of the terminator:



a bit later i took crack at saturn:


while the moon has now wandered off, jupiter and venus will continue to close until tues 6/30/15 when they will be .3 degrees apart, and can be caught together in a medium power telescope field. 

Processing notes:
One of the problems with imaging jupiter with a mono camera is that it rotates so rapidly that the surface details move between red, green and blue filter images.  Here are the rotating originals:

I used a software program called WinJupos to "derotate" the images for the RGB combine:


nexstar 8 GPS (8" SCT on alt azm mount)
ZWO ASI120MM-S
zwo RGB filters stacked in autostakkert, Drizzle 3x
wavelets in registax6 derotated and compbined in winJupos

red channel only was used for venus and the moon as it's less subject to atmospheric distortion due to poor seeing

RL deconvolution in maxim DL and finally reduced to 2x scale
except moon drizzle to 1.5x.

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