Jupiter Is Back!

The other night I realized Jupiter was VERY high in the sky. After a quick check on Stellarium it looks like Jupiter reaches well above 70 degrees elevation, which makes for some really good photography conditions!

I was a bit impatient and tonight took a photo at about 45 degrees elevation. I didn’t collimate and I focused by eye on the moons of Jupiter, so it wasn’t perfect but I just wanted to get a passable image. I used my 3x barlow lens, turned the gain way up to 400, and reduced the shutter speed to as fast as I could reasonably go, this ended up being 5ms. I also shrunk the image size in an attempt to speed up my frame rate.

The full video length was 3 minutes and I ended up with over 7000 images. Firecapture said I should get over 100 frames per second, but that works out to less than 50 per second. Eventually I’ll have to look into that discrepancy.

From there I used my normal process: autostakkert for stacking, registax for wavelet sharpening, and my phone for some color balancing.

This image was more grainy than I was expecting, especially when looking at my pictures from November of 2023 which were much better. I noticed those images were taken with my 5x barlow lens instead of the 3x. So I quickly ran back outside with the 5x to take another 3 minute video. I got about half the frames due to needing a higher shutter speed, but the rest of the process was the same.

One big thing I noticed was there were a LOT of dirt spots on my image with the 5x barlow lens, I might finally be reaching a spot where I need to deep clean all my lenses and even my telescope primary mirror.

My image with the 5x barlow lens, all other steps of the process unchanged:

The image is certainly larger with the 5x lens, but no sharper. Because I did this so quickly there ended up being some wavelets artifacts on either side showing up as purple vertical lines, but it’s not worth fixing those. At least it was nice being outside and doing a little experiment between my lenses.

It looks like I have some deep cleaning coming up!