Thursday, January 16, 2014

Jupiter's 'boring side'

Everyone loves the GRS (Great Red Spot); a giant storm that has persisted in the Jovian atmosphere since before the time a telescope was first pointed at Jupiter by Galileo.  Tonight, the GRS was somewhere on the side of Jupiter facing away from Earth and I imaged what astronomers jokingly refer to it's boring side.  The picture below is a stack of 3 images, each of which was itself a stack of between 250 and 400 individual frames, all taken within about 90 seconds of each other.  Jupiter rotates so quickly (a day on Jupiter is approximately 9 hours!) that if I were to spend more time taking video, the resulting stacked image would be blurred from Jupiter's rotation.  There is software to deal with this 'de-rotation' issue in processing, but I am still too far back on the learning curve to deal with that.  This is, I think, my best image of Jupiter to date.

Picture taken through my Celestron 11" Edge HD, using an ASI120MC camera

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