What with poor weather and generally poor seeing, it was great to have a restbite on 30 December 2014 and grab some decent results of Jupiter. The conditions for this shot were reasonable but by no means the best I’ve seen from my observing location. A slight northerly component to the wind direction messes up my seeing, air having to pass across land rather than sea, as is the case for me when the wind is from the southeast, south or southwest.
The image is the result of taking a number of movie sequences, sorting and stacking the frames held within each sequence and combining all of these into a final result.
Here, four 90s red filtered mono images were combined with two 90s green filtered images and two 90s blues to produce a final RGB colour result.
As Jupiter is a fast rotator, spinning once on its axis in less than 10 hours, an imaging period of this length would normally result in a blurred RGB. However, using the wonderful WinJupos software it is possible to derotate each result back to a common time.
The net result is a final RGB that looks sharp, detailed and unblurred by Jupiter’s rapid rotation.
Night Sky Diary 