Jupiter in Motion and the Rings of Saturn

Jupiter and Saturn have finally drifted into view at a reasonable hour, so I can now get pictures without staying up all night! Last year I took a time lapse of Jupiter rotating and it was incredibly cool, but the results weren’t quite what I wanted. This weekend I had some time, some beautiful weather, and some good views of Jupiter to try again. A day on Jupiter is only ten hours long, so if we take pictures over a few hours we can make an animation of a noticeable amount of rotation.

I took a 1 minute video of Jupiter every ten minutes for about two and a half hours, totaling 18 videos. My 1200mm focal length telescope had a 2x barlow lens, 9mm eyepiece, and used my cell phone to capture the videos. The camera app says ISO 800, shutter 1/150 seconds, and digital zoom of 3.73x to get rid of the eyepiece vignetting.

Each video was aligned in PIPP, and the top 20% of frames were stacked in Autostakkert. Registax was used to sharpen each resulting image with wavelet filters. I think I over-exposed most of the images because they have a horrible halo around them after the wavelets sharpening. I was able to tone down the effect slightly by lowering the exposure around the edges of the planet in Darktable photo editing software. The halo is still there, but not as apparent. Frames were manually rotated to a specific orientation in GIMP, and the animation was put together in Windows Movie Maker.

I wish that halo wasn’t there, but I’m very pleased with the results. You can see color, and can definitely make out structure in the bands of clouds!

When I was done Saturn was high in the sky, so I thought it would be a crime to pass up an opportunity to see Saturn while I was already set up. All the processing is the same as for Jupiter, but the camera shutter speed was reduced to 1/100 seconds.