# Latest Jupiter Shot (OT/NT)



## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

I took this earlier this evening from my driveway...










"Seeing" (what astronomy calls the level of atmospheric turbulence) was just average, as was atmospheric transparency (a good amount of water vapor in the air), so clarity isn't as good as it might have been. But ya takes what ya gets.










BTW, the Great Red Spot - the salmon-colored spot in the lower hemisphere seen in the photo - is a huge anti-cyclonic (high pressure) storm similar to a hurricane on earth. The thing is so enormous you could fit THREE earths within its boundaries, and it's been raging for 400 years that humans have been observing it (God knows how long it raged before we ever saw it). As there is no landmass or solid surface on Jupiter for it to run into and dissipate, it just keeps going and going and going... pretty amazing!


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## Gary Armitstead (Jan 2, 2008)

Those bands are beautiful tonight! Surprising how subdued The Great Red Spot is also. Very nice shot.


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

Dwight

Very nice picture.


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## Nutz-n-Bolts (Aug 12, 2010)

Amazing Dwight, Home astronomy has come a long way. It's mind blowing how big these celestial bodies can be.


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## NTCGRR (Jan 2, 2008)

I bet your bedroom has plants hanging from the ceiling??


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

Don't listen to Marty, everyone in Nebraska thinks everyone in any other state is a hippie! hahahaha!


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## toddalin (Jan 4, 2008)

Nice shot. Rare to see no moons or their shadows.


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## Jerry Barnes (Jan 2, 2008)

Nice shot Dwight. What kind of telescope do you have. My son and I made a 10" Dobsonian years ago, now I wish I still had it, now that I live out of town.


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

Nice shot.  Rare to see no moons or their shadows.There was actually a moon in the original film clip, but it was washing in and out due to turbulence and must have gotten processed out.What kind of telescope do you have.11" Celestron Nexstar. If I'd known any better when I bought it, I'd have opted for the same optical tube on an equatorial mount instead of the alt/az I have - not that it would have made any difference here as Jupiter can only be imaged for around 90 seconds before its own fast rotation begins to smear things. But on Saturn and other planets, as well as deep space photography, field rotation becomes an issue for me.


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## CliffyJ (Apr 29, 2009)

Beautiful!! 

==Cliff 

PS, what does OT/NT refer to? I always thought it was Old Testament / New Testament, but I assume it has a different meaning here...


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By CliffyJ on 17 Feb 2013 03:32 PM 
Beautiful!! 

==Cliff 

PS, what does OT/NT refer to? I always thought it was Old Testament / New Testament, but I assume it has a different meaning here... 
Cliff

OT/NT = Off Topic/Not Trains


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## Gary Armitstead (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By Dwight Ennis on 17 Feb 2013 02:44 PM 
Nice shot. Rare to see no moons or their shadows.There was actually a moon in the original film clip, but it was washing in and out due to turbulence and must have gotten processed out. What kind of telescope do you have.11" Celestron Nexstar. If I'd known any better when I bought it, I'd have opted for the same optical tube on an equatorial mount instead of the alt/az I have - not that it would have made any difference here as Jupiter can only be imaged for around 90 seconds before its own fast rotation begins to smear things. But on Saturn and other planets, as well as deep space photography, field rotation becomes an issue for me. Dwight,

Just as a side note here. I am really getting some inspiration from your picture, to get out my old 6" Cave Astrola reflector. It's on display as a "collectible" in my living room now. Thomas Cave passed away in 2003 and owned Cave Optical in Long Beach, CA. His scopes were considered top of the line my many amatuer astronomers back in the 60's and 70's. The mirrors on his reflectors were considered excellent and are prized even now. I bought it new in 1973 with a huge equatorial mount and "star" drive and declination drive. One of his employees at the time, worked at Palomar and built the electronics for my scope......variable and adjustable drive mainly for astro-photography. Special counter-balance to compensate for the camera and special rotating rings for the tube to keep the eyepiece in a comfortable position. For todays scopes, this is all routine, but forty years ago, it was state of the art. How things have changed!


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## toddalin (Jan 4, 2008)

Posted By Gary Armitstead on 17 Feb 2013 04:00 PM 
Dwight,

Just as a side note here. I am really getting some inspiration from your picture, to get out my old 6" Cave Astrola reflector. It's on display as a "collectible" in my living room now. Thomas Cave passed away in 2003 and owned Cave Optical in Long Beach, CA. His scopes were considered top of the line my many amatuer astronomers back in the 60's and 70's. The mirrors on his reflectors were considered excellent and are prized even now. I bought it new in 1973 with a huge equatorial mount and "star" drive and declination drive. One of his employees at the time, worked at Palomar and built the electronics for my scope......variable and adjustable drive mainly for astro-photography. Special counter-balance to compensate for the camera and special rotating rings for the tube to keep the eyepiece in a comfortable position. For todays scopes, this is all routine, but forty years ago, it was state of the art. How things have changed!












The owners of the Mystic Mountain Railroad in the Palo Alto area (they make the dragon trains) had an observatory dome with a big Cave behind the house that they were trying to get rid of. They needed someone to bust it out of the concrete. I got a tour when they hosted the convention. It was set up with the two different sized finder scopes. I called on it last year and it was gone.


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

I am really getting some inspiration from your picture, to get out my old 6" Cave Astrola reflector.Go for it Gary!!







I find that looking at the planets and especially other galaxies is a real attitude adjuster in a very humbling sort of way. It really puts my petty little daily problems into proper perspective. Unfortunately, I live in a very light polluted area which makes viewing other galaxies impractical for all intents and purposes - all I see is a faint gray smudge against a slightly darker gray background. I have on occasion taken my scope to a truly dark location, and the views there are breathtaking! Fortunately, the planets are bright enough to see and photograph even in a light polluted area.

I took the scope to the Shingletown Star Party a couple of times - until they stopped doing them. On one such occasion I managed to find and view Quasar 3C-273 - a very distant active galactic core with a supermassive black hole at its center "feeding" on the surrounding gas and putting out horrendous amounts of energy. Its supposed to be the most distant object that can be seen with telescopes around the size of mine. After finding it, all I could see was a faint point of light. But as I was looking at it, I was thinking that it was TWO-BILLION light years away!! When the light then entering my eyeball actually left that object, there weren't even multicellular organisms on this planet yet. That light had been travelling en route for two-billion years, only to end its long journey when it hit the retina of my eyeball. Pretty darned amazing and humbling!! I find it isn't always necessarily what you're seeing so much as realizing what your looking at!!

Planetary photography has really evolved. An amature today can take planetary photos with a simple web cam that rival those produced by the 200" Palomar telescope a generation ago. The above photo was produced with a simple web cam and processed using freeware. So if you already have a scope, the equipment required for planetary photography isn't expensive.

Here's a shot of Saturn I got back in March of '05...










And one of Mars from Sept. of '05...










Both of these were also taken with a simple web cam. Plenty out there to keep you busy.


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## Stan Cedarleaf (Jan 2, 2008)

Awesome, Dwight... 

Move to Preskit and you'll have 5000 feet less atmosphere to contend with...


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

Move to Preskit and you'll have 5000 feet less atmosphere to contend with.Still may happen someday Stan.


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## Gary Armitstead (Jan 2, 2008)

Absolutely beautiful shots Dwight!









It is really incredible what you are getting from that 11 inch. I remember as a little kid going up to Griffith Observatory and looking at the plantetary photos from Palomar and they did not have the resolution you are getting! That's ONLY sixty years ago. You can keep right on posting these "beauties". Awesome! 

Todd:

When I first visited Cave in 1972 checking on a new scope, he had a 16" reflector in the showroom. I "lusted" after that thing big time! Here's a photo out of their 1975 catalogue.










Look at the size of the base! Cave had it bolted to the showroom floor.


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

It is really incredible what you are getting from that 11 inch. I remember as a little kid going up to Griffith Observatory and looking at the plantetary photos from Palomar and they did not have the resolution you are getting! That's ONLY sixty years ago.Thanks Gary. In the "old days" they were relying on time exposures onto film or glass plates. Digital photography and processing have made all the difference.


All the above photos started out as an AVI film clip from a simple web cam with total exposure time ranging from no more than 90 seconds on Jupiter (it rotates so fast that enything longer starts smearing the detail) to around 3 minutes for Saturn and Mars (as I have an Alt/Az mount, anything longer creates field rotation problems for me), at between 15 and 25 fps. The resulting video clip is processed through freeware that aligns the frames, sorts them by quality, and "stacks" the frames (digitally superimposes them one upon the others) to create a single image. This vastly improves the signal-to-noise ratio as anything not in a majority of the frames gets suppressed while anything present in the majority gets enhanced. The resulting image is further processed through a set of "wavelet filters" for further clarify and bring out the detail. Brightness, color balance, contrast, etc. can also be manipulated.

The user is in complete control of pretty much every step of the process, from selecting which frames get used based upon the cutoff (rejection) point in their quality. Wavelet filter processing is also manually controlled with the user deciding how "aggressively" they are employed (it's easy to get carried away here and end up with something full of artifacts that looks phony). The end result of digital manipulation is, as you say, a guy like me can produce better stuff than the pros using film could 60 years ago.

These same techniques (albeit far more sophisticated) are employed on all space photography today - from Hubble to Cassini to WMAP to... you name it. Fortunately, they can be employed by an amateur as well, and for not very much money. It is the kind of thing with a steep initial learning curve though, and a continuous somewhat shallower one after the basics are learned. There are many people out there with a lot more talent than me producing much better images than mine.


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## toddalin (Jan 4, 2008)

I have an 8-1/4" Criterion Schmidt with both the tripod and table top stands and even an old steamer truck to store it in. I had an intermediate plate made out of aluminum to "fix" a crack in the base and put one of the Starr-tech platters on it to stiffen it up. We even increased the diameter of the knurled tensioning bolt. The guy who used to make the Starr-tech platters makes the billet aluminum spacers for my alternator mounts.

It's a classic but don't get images like that. (Wasn't Criterion's best effort.) 

BTW, I have one or two "corrector plates" for an 8" Celestron if anyone needs one.


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## Ray Dunakin (Jan 6, 2008)

Wow, those photos are amazing! I would love to have a big scope and camera rig to take out to the wilds of Nevada, but can't really justify the expense for something that would only get casual use once or twice a year. 

When I was in my late teens, I bought a cheap, used, refractor telescope, about 125x, at a garage sale. I could just barely make out the rings of Saturn with it, but even that was a thrill.


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## vsmith (Jan 2, 2008)

Cool stuff, my own attempts at astronomy were less successful as I could never afford the right equipment


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

For those wanting a telescope just for viewing, look into a DOB. Orion Telescopes has a nice 8" DOB reflector for $379.98 right now...










*Link to Orion Page* 

For photography, you'll need something that tracks (DOBs don't as a general rule).


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