Saturn 9-17-2002 5:20am
Picture of Jupiter taken on 11-13-2002 at 6:19 am using a Philips Vesta Pro 690K and a Televue 5X Powermate on a 12.5" f/5 Portaball. Tracking was achieved with a Tom O. single axis platform. Recorded an avi file at full 640x480, 30 fps, 1/33-second exposure, manual gain of around 30-40%, for a total of 517 frames. Picture is the result of the 72 best frames picked using Avi2Bmp, stacked and processed with dyadic filter in Registax. Final color balance and sharpness were adjusted with Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE. The image scale made it very difficult to center Jupiter on the chip. The scope/platform was sitting on a wooden balcony which transmitted a considerable amount of vibration to the avi file. A higher percentage of frames would have been salvaged if the telescope/platform was sitting on solid ground. The image was reduced to 400x300 because there was insufficient detail resolved to justify 640x480 resolution. Io is the moon furthest away in the picture and is casting the shadow on Jupiter. The moon that looks closer is Europa but it is actually on the far side of the Jupiter. Sky stability was fairly good for Indiana.

Photo by David keller