Jupiter and Io

I’m still experimenting with my planetary camera.  During the week of the full moon, I reconfigured the telescope with the new camera and tried different focal lengths and exposure durations.  The seeing was not very steady so a Televue 2x barlow was all the magnification the atmosphere would allow.  This results in the telescope effectively being a f/10.6 instrument.

The sub-frame size was small enough and the camera exposure setting was quick enough to allow the camera’s full 60 fps capability.  However, the actual frame duration is not captured in any metadata associated with the video.  Lesson learned; record the duration and gain in the file name.  Io was close enough that I used it as the focus target.

Once I get a handle on the camera I will add another variable into the equation and add on a filter wheel and attempt full color exposures.

This image was taken on the 2nd of February.  South is up.  The source avi file was 10,000 frames with 9,274 making the cut.  AviStack was used to extract, register and stack the individual frames and RegiStax’s wavelet function was used for final processing.