Almost exactly 1 month ago, I posted a preview of the upcoming Jupiter season for the 2009 apparition, and in the post I guessed that about month from then would be a good time to start imaging.

Well my prediction came true and this morning I was able to capture my first images of Jupiter for Season 2009! The seeing was about average for the altitude, but there was a waves of instability crossing the image from left to right, changing the shape of Jupiter quite significantly through the capture window.

I captured 6 runs, and I’ve got the 2 best from the session to post today. This one below is the last from my session when Jupiter was about 34° altitude.

First Jupiter for Season 2009

I’ve also collected some more early-apparition images of Jupiter from Australia and the Phillipines – the image by Anthony Wesley, also from this morning, is just fantastic for this early in the season and I can’t wait to see what he produces later in the year (especially when his new scope is complete!).

Please read on to see the rest of the images and for more details about the capture and processing of my images.

The image below is by Anthony Wesley, from Canberra Australia, and was captured this morning, 17th March UT using a 13.1″ Newtonian.

Jupiter, March 17th 2009 by Anthony Wesley

This next image is by Tomio Akutsu, Cebu Phillipines on the 16th March using a 14″ Celestron SCT.

Jupiter on the 16th March by Tomio Akutsu

And now, one by Chris Go, from Cebu Phillipines on the 16th March using an 11″ Celestron SCT.

Jupiter on the 16th March by Chris Go

And here’s my second image, it’s actually the first one that I recorded this morning. Jupiter was 23° altitude when this was captured.

First Jupiter for Season 2009

I’m reasonably happy with my images for the start of the season. The southerly declination of Jupiter at the moment makes it perfect for us down south to get some good early-apparition images before it heads North.

I used my normal Planetary Imaging Equipment to capture the data. Each colour channel was recorded @ 30fps for 40 seconds, giving 1200 frames in each channel. Pre-processing was done using Ninox, and the best 250 frames from each channel was stacked and processed in Registax 5.

AstraImage was used for deconvolution and to combine the colour channels, before final processing in Photoshop CS2.

I’m looking forward to the end of daylight savings so the sun rises before I go to work. At the moment, the Sun doesn’t come up until around 7am and I have to head to work at 6am – so I can only capture Jupiter on weekends or when i’m working from home (like today). In April, I’ll be able to finish capturing Jupiter and still head off to work at the normal time. Only a few weeks left!

Thanks for looking.

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