Big Jupo

I have a good seeing last night. So I got my best Jupiter yet. Here it is:

It is 4x resampled via Registax Mitchell and PS. After resampled I can spot more details in bands and polar zones.

As always I used the 6-inch no-EQ mounted newtonian reflector, the 14mm eyepiece doing afocal projection over the Canon EOS 450d (Rebel XTi) body and recording video using “EOS Camera Movie Record” free software. Three times Jupiter crossed over the field of view. Registax and VirtualDub added and stacked the footage properly.

Ganymede’s shadow

Yesterday night I had the chance to enjoy a multiple moon transition in Jupiter. Ganymede and Europa were crossing Jupiter and throwing their shadows to the big planet. Here it is an image of the event. At 23h 24m U.T Europa’s shadow was not visible yet. Io also appears at the photo but it was beneath the planet. In a minutes it would disappear.

The picture was taken with my digital reflex body (EOS Rebel XTi) and using the video capture software that converts it into a high quality webcam.

Jupiter Opposition

15th August 2009 was the day that Jupiter reached its closest position to Earth. Its apparent diameter was 49 arcseconds, so this is the best time to do planetary astrophotography with the giant planet. Using the afocal technique and a Canon EOS 450d body I took 2 video sequences and processed with Registax 5, Photoshop & Pain Shop Pro.

Wesley impact scar

Several days ago a comet hit Jupiter leaving a dark spot near one of its polar regions. Today this spot is still visible with a powerful telescope. Maybe if I have a high power Barlow lens I could have observed it visually. But fortunately there exist astrophotography, a technique that lets you observer indirectly what you can’t spot directly through a telescope.

In this same picture I include a Jupiter from the day before yesterday. The lack of atmospheric turbulence gave me a chance to get closer to the maximum theoretical resolution of a 6-inch telescope.

Hommel crater

Hommel is a big crater with nice craterlets inside, a Clavius-style set, but smaller, measuring 76 miles (129 Km). It is located in the South-East area of the visible Moon face. This area is pledge of small craters. It is similar in appearance to the sand of a beach. Pitiscus, Nearch and Asclepi are some of its neighbors.

The picture was taken at 19 days of lunation, that is 4 days after full Moon. This is the best timing to get sharp images of the crater’s walls’ shadows. The image is an integration of 27 subframes, each one taken at 9 Megapixels single shots with point-and-shoot digicam Casio Exilim EX-FS10.

Lyra & Hercules constellations

Last night Lyra and Hercules were located near the zenith of my suburban sky, so I could make a series of 90 shots with 10 seconds of exposure each one. My equipment was the DSLR camera Canon EOS 450 (Rebel XTi). This image sequence is equivalent to a 15 minutes long single shot. After adding them with the shift-and-add technique, and substracting a dark frame (via Photoshop) that includes light pollution I got a final picture. I have aligned (using Nebulosity 2 software) the Stellarium map of the area and created an animated gif that switchs from the photo to the map continuously. It seems every star is located correctly where it should be 😉

Globular clusters M13 and M92 are there in the photo like 2 stars.

Astrophotography Software

It is important to apply the best astronomical software to enhance your pictures. Otherwise noise, blur, light pollution, hot and cold pixels and low exposures can degrade our work. Here is a list of my favorite astrophotography software:

* Image Stacking: Registax, PhotoAcute Studio, Nebulosity and DeepSkyStacker.

* Retouching: Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop.

* Zooming: onOne Genuine Fractals.

* Sharpening: Maximum entropy deconvolution with AstroArt, and wavelets with Registax.

* Noise removal: Neat Image.

* Video edition: VirtualDub, Adobe Premiere and EasyBMPtoAVI.

* Night sky renderers: Stellarium, StarryNight, Google Earth & WikiSky.

Background substraction

Astrophotos taken in light polluted skies use to show a noisy gray background that should be avoided mainly for aesthetic reasons, and also to gain contrast in deep-sky objects. Using some image software like Paintshop Pro or Photoshop it is simple to correct the image in 4 steps:

1.- Make a copy of the image.

2.- Level the copy from zero to the highest background noise value. This way bright stars will appear as dim as background.

3.- Gaussian Blur the copy.

4.- Substract the copy to the original picture. You may add a small offset to the substraction if the background removal is very hard.

Here is an example with Orion constellation: