finally – after another endless dryspell (clouds, rain, rain, rain, snow, sickness…) – clear skies and decent seeing. The night of January 15th provided fair conditions for my best Jupiter images to date. I could capture the Io transit right beneath the GRS and the start of Io’s shadow transit. After 13 G/R/B/IR sequences I stopped the session since seeing turned too bad to continue. 2 sequences are fully processed, a lot more are waiting to be finished for an animation of Io’s transit. Here one RGB version, click the image for all captures of the session:

Cheers, Oliver

I spent a good amount of time adding my image catalogue into the new database – quite a time travel with lots of memories
The majority of lunar images is now accessible in the image search.

Cheers & Happy Holidays!
Oliver

I implemented an image-search functionality to query for images by objects. The DB is only partly filled by now, all images will be available after the upcoming holiday season – at least if skies will not be permanently clear Extended search patterns will follow…

Cheers, Oliver

here two results from my Jupiter session on November 21st. My best Jupiter up to date despite the not optimal seeing conditions, still plenty of room for improvement

Cheers, Oliver

I decided to redesign the site since the old design using frames, images and static pages is pretty outdated. First step has been to implement a database hosting the images. This will give search-functionalities and the site maintenance will be very quick. The Jupiter 2012 section is already implemented using dynamic pages, what a relief regarding adding new images
The ephemeris section is now also created dynamically – also low maintenance.

A complete redesign might take a while but the upcoming Christmas season  might be a good opportunity when nights are cloudy.

Cheers, Oliver

last night promised to be been clear, I decided to give Jupiter another imaging run and put the C11 outside in the evening with the two fans on full throttle. Seeing looked a bit disappointing during collimation since diffraction rings smeared across a fairly large area but I guess I have to learn that the Pickering-scale has been defined using a 5″ telescope and the mileage varies using 11″ aperture – things can look worse than they are.
After connecting the Basler Ace to the laptop I did not get any connection, swapping cables and switching the user did not help. I got a bit nervous and rebooted the machine – voila!
The camera image was quite stable even through the green filter using a 2x barlow and I perfomed several G-R-B-IR runs. Around 22:30 Io started to transit Jupiter’s disk. Io’s brightness in IR was quite evident. Unfortunately the seeing went worse during the transit and I decided to end the session, probably partly induced by Jupiter standing over my roof now. Ok, the harddrive was full anyway and my hands  started to feel cold…

Here a quick and dirty red channel result of a randomly picked AVI, the real processing is to begin soon…

Cheers, Oliver

hey, I made it to image Jupiter again after six years
I used my new Basler Ace 640-100GM for the first time and am quite satisfied with the Sony ICX618ALA equipped dwarf camera. Seeing has been significantly below average, transparency very bad due to haze and fog illuminated by the near moon. Nevertheless I could use the Ace at 9.8ms exposure time for red and green channels with the C11 at f20 – quite impressive.

RRGB version, click image for full version with channels

I was unsure which capture software to use with the Ace. the second one tried in the field that night has been Torsten Edelmann’s Firecapture and it worked like a charm on my U7300 powered W7 64Bit subnotebook operating at 1.3GHz only. I replaced the hard-drive with a Hitachi 7200upm version and could capture 102FPS without any issues at full frame size of 659×494 pixels, great to image the quickly rotating Jupiter. I’ll use a tad less gain for future imaging runs. So far the Ace has not produced any artefacts running at high frame rates, excellent!

Stay tuned for more captures, I hope to have some decent seeing to bring the imaging rig closer to it’s limits.

Cheers, Oliver

Cheers, Oliver

another one from September 25th: The dissolving AR11301 in white-light:

Click image for larger version

Cheers, Oliver

I finally managed to image again after a very long dryspell – slowly recovering my imaging skills. I really enjoyed collecting photons of our star although setting up the gear after more than a year was quite challenging: What’s the password of my imaging laptop? Where’s the cabling for the power supply? Can I get into focus with the micro-focuser that I never used before? I have been rewarded with a quite active solar surface. Great to see that the boring years are over for a while.
Processing the results has been another challenge: Registax6 and AVIStack2 showed up in the meantime since I processed something for the last time. I’m still toying around and evaluate the new versions looking for my personal best solution, here some first results processed with Registax6:

AR11302 shows some impressive spots:
 
Click image for a larger view

AR11298 just rotatating out of view, my first try in CaK with the Baader K-Line filter:
 
Click image for a larger view

Here the imaging rig. My significant other called it ‘equipment overkill’. I strongly disagree

Some more images to follow…

Cheers, oliver