I had a fairly busy morning this morning – knowing that the skies were going to be clear (well, hoping), the waning crescent Moon was well positioned, a bright ISS and STS-119 Discovery pass was going overhead, and then of course Jupiter which is climbing to a manageable 35° altitude before dawn.

I managed to capture all three objects, and here’s the first one that has been processed. It’s Jupiter in seeing that was very similar to my first attempt for 2009, captured on Wednesday morning.

The resolution isn’t great due to the seeing, but Oval BA is visible just past the CM. I missed the best of the seeing as it deteriorated further as dawn approached. I was busy capturing the Moon and the ISS, and Jupiter was still too low. 

Jupiter and Oval BA

Continue reading for more capture and processing information.

It’s interesting to note that the Oval BA is still fairly red/orange, and the SEB is quite unusual with the darker lines on SEBn and SEBs. The NEB is still quite dark.

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 300 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.

Thanks for looking.

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