Jupiter in 3D!

While poking around astrophotography sections of Reddit and Twitter I’ve once in a while seen people make magic-eye style 3D images. The idea is you have two images of a planet next to each other and when you cross your eyes a third 3D planet will appear.

I realized I just took a lot of photos of Jupiter for my animation, and I should have enough to even have different angular perspectives on the planet that could be substituted for two eye perspective shift.

It took me a few different attempts to get one that worked nicely. First attempts had the planets too far apart and my eyes couldn’t bring them together. Then I used images about 20 minutes apart, but that was too much perspective change for my brain to make it 3D. Finally I settled on 10 minutes which worked well.

This image works well for me on my phone, but it’s too large on my computer screen for my eyes to make it work.

After this version worked I realized I had 12 individual images. I could theoretically make 10 pairs of these images and make a 3D animation! About 15 minutes of Python scripting later I had this.

One thing that jumped out to me is that I didn’t correct for field rotation and technically each of these Jupiter photos is slightly rotated compared to the other. Amazingly this slight rotation error hasn’t impacted my brains ability to make a 3D image.