Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

Another evening photographing Jupiter. This time with the BAS Celestron 925 on the 23rd Jul. Separate red, green and blue avi’s of 45 seconds each were taken, stacked in Registax and then combined in the GIMP (an open source imaging program).

The ’seeing’ was pretty good, but once again, the very low altitude limited the detail in the picture. However, the Great Red Spot is just visible on the right had side of the planet.

Processing a picture taken some 10 minutes earlier shows more of the GRS and comparing the images also reveals the speed that the planet is rotating. This image is in red light only and I’ve flipped it both horizontally and vertically to match convention.

Finally, the opportunity to photograph Jupiter presented itself on a fine Saturday evening. With the current Astronomy Now competition limiting entries to ones produced with telescopes under 4 inches in diameter I decided to try out the BAS 3″ Vixen refractor.

Bad seeing curtailed imaging at midnight but I managed to capture a few sequences with red, green & blue filters.  With the planet barely 9 degrees above the horizon, results were never going to be stunning, but some sharpening of a composite image produced the following: