23.01.2019
New aspect: Taking an image of Jupiter
Image acquisition:
I took video files of both planets on the morning of the 23th of January. It was a Wednesday so I was (again) in a hurry. Setting up the scope was not that hard but keeping the last trouble with the moving Venus in mind I took one more look through the polarscope to align a bit more properly than last time. Then I searched and found Venus. Again the planet was so incredible bright, that was not able to choose the right settings for exposure and focus. I tried my best ether way. Jupiter was a more easy part. I did some over exposes videos to capture the moons of Jupiter and then fiddled around to find the sweet spot for exposure, gain and “brightness” (whatever this item means). I finally managed to grab three files before I had to end the session. Focus? A nightmare!
Image processing:
For Venus: Same same. All I got from AutoStakkert!2 was a whitish blobby image of Venus. You can see the phase but that’s all.
For Jupiter: This was my first attempt on Jupiter especially with the modded webcam. After stacking in AutoStakkert!2 I imported the file into Registax6 and sharpened it. I was able to gain a dizzy image of Jupiter with some stripes of clouds across the surface. That was certainly something! Even though: The view through an eyepiece revealed so much more so all in all I was quite disappointed. Never the less I took the opportunity to merge the image of Jupiter with the overexposed image of its moons. This image sets Jupiter into sort of perspective and I liked it.
Jupiter with 3x barlow and Logitech webcam Jupiter and moons with 3x barlow and Logitech webcam
Conclusion:
Whatever you have to do in order to get Venus set up nice and well… I don’t know! Maybe setting brightness and stuff down to nothing and then work upwards until you see something? Next try.
Jupiter was a start. In my understanding the exposure/brightness was too low. As I nearly couldn’t see anything on the laptop screen no wonder I couldn’t create a sharp image from that source. Let’s see where the limits of that cheap webcam are.
Greetings and clear skies,
Chris