Imaging Jupiter - 12th March 2014

On the 11th and 12th of March there were some very clear nights and whilst a lot of the Central Scotland Observers Group headed out to the dark site at Harperrig Reservoir I was unable to go as my wife made me go to the gym! Therefore I decided that on the 12th once I got home at 9pm I would just set up my telescope in the back garden and try and get some images of Jupiter as it was high in the sky.

Now I have taken images of Jupiter in the past and they were okay but I was sure I could manage something better so I got my Xbox Webcam and sat there for about 15 minutes playing with the settings on my capture software which is called Sharpcap.

 My first attempt was just to get a nice picture and try and get some of the moons to show up so I just plugged the webcam directly into the telescope and managed to get about 1000 frames in 2 minutes. The reason I limited it to 2 minutes is that Jupiter rotates so quickly that after that you can begin to get issues when you stack the frames due to the rotation of the planet. So after stacking and editing in some more free astronomy software called Registax I managed to achieve the following:

As you can see I managed to get some lovely banding colour and also picked up three of the Galilean moons which were from left to right, Callisto, Io & Ganymede. From what I can see in Stellarium it turns out that the forth Galilean moon of Europa was actually transiting across the face of the planet but I couldn't pick that out.

So after this success I decided to try and use my 2x Barlow Lens which would double the magnification. My last attempt at using the Barlow produced a nice image but I failed to pick up any colour so this time I was determined that by fiddling some more with Sharpcap I could get something to show up.

Once again I got some success in that I managed to get colour in the banding although I have to admit the focus wasn't perfect. I struggled to get the focus right at this magnification because my 127 Mak isn't the best when it comes to the focus mechanism. Basically, it isn't what you would call light touch and using it causes the whole telescope to shake which isn't helpful when you are up at high magnifications. In the end I am happy enough and I will just need to keep playing around in the future in an attempt to improve it.

Overall I managed to achieve what I planned to do in that I got some images of Jupiter that were better than what I had previously managed. I still think there is more to be achieved from this set up and hopefully I can get better as I use the webcam and software more. What I would really like to do in the future is try and capture one of the moon shadow transits but I need this to happen when the sky is clear and when I am allowed to skip the gym!!