Hi all,
Saw the lovely pairing of the moon and Jupiter closeby last night, I shot this image of Jupiter through my scope and a high speed digital camera. Its
a stack of 1200 frames. Its in B&W since I used a red filter (colour needs separate RGB images merged into one)
The bright spot in the image is the moon Io transiting in front of the disc of Jupiter.
Ateo - 1-22-2013 at 02:22 PM
Awesome.CortezBlue - 1-22-2013 at 03:27 PM
Ok, I understand frame stacking and I understand 1200 images, but............
How did you take the 1200 frames? I am assuming you were tracking? How much time were the 1200 frames taken in? Also, what resolution? JPG?astrobaja - 1-22-2013 at 03:51 PM
Hi Cortez,
This is the type of camera I use, its meant for video-microscopy but any low light application will work so its good for astronomy too.
I captured about 2300 frames in a 90 second period (any longer than that the surface features will tend to smear a little because of Jupiters
extremely fast rotation). So I'm getting about 25 frames per second. Its an uncompressed video stream so the files are big -- about 2-4 GB.
I use whats called a barlow lens to quadruple the focal length of my scope to give about a 9000mm focal length. Thats whats needed to get the correct
amount of image scale so that the finest details can be captured. After that I process the file with freeware that picks the sharpest frames,
registers each one accurately one on top of another to give a final "stacked" Tiff file which can then be sharpened in Photo Shop. Yes my scope is
tracking during the capture, I use a hand controller to fine tune the guiding. As complicated as it sounds its actually way simpler than what is
involved with imaging faint objects such as galaxies and nebulae, which need hours and hours of data using separate red green and blue filters.Bruce R Leech - 1-22-2013 at 05:52 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by CortezBlue
Ok, I understand frame stacking and I understand 1200 images, but............
How did you take the 1200 frames? I am assuming you were tracking? How much time were the 1200 frames taken in? Also, what resolution? JPG?
even in still or single photos pros don't shot JPG any more they shot what is called RAW which is uncompressed digital. this is what I shout and after
post production I can convert them to jpg or gif or what ever. one frame photo in raw with my camera can be 30 megabits.
