Jupiter Animation on a Stunningly Clear Night

The last few weeks have not been great for astronomy, the weather has been fine at best. Thankfully last night everything finally lined up. Jupiter and Saturn are up at reasonable times of night, Jupiter hit it’s highest point last night right as the great red spot directly faced me, and the weather was crystal clear.

After a few mishaps with my focus I finally got everything squared away to get the best pictures of Saturn and Jupiter that I’ve ever taken.

First was Saturn because it’s ahead of Jupiter slightly so it’s up first. I focused, collimated, and used my 3x barlow lens with the ZWO ASI290MC camera. The camera was set to 10ms exposure time and 375 gain, this gave me high really high frame rate while still exposing Saturn nicely. I took a 3 minute video, stacked in autostakkert, and sharpened with wavelets in Registax.

Saturn ended up being nice and bright, the shadow of the planet is visible on the rings in the upper left, and the gap in the rings is visible all the way around.

Next I moved to Jupiter, the setup was the same except the camera gain was lowered to 250. I took one test image at 2.5 minutes long.

I quickly processed this image to make sure everything was going well, when I saw the stunning results I started taking a 90 second video every 5 minutes. I didn’t have enough hard drive space to do this so I was constantly dumping to an external drive just in time to start the next video. I individually processed each of the 12 frames in autostakkert and registax and ended up with a stunning animation.

I am SO pleased with how this came out. It’s is by far my best animation of Jupiter, and with so much detail it looks more three dimensional than I’ve ever seen before!