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Description
Warning – Big File!

So I got the motivation last night to go and sit outside in the freezing cold for a few hours in order to make another animation of Jupiter’s rotation. This is the result.

This animation spans exactly 2.5 hours. I captured a 30 second AVI (at 60 FPS) every 5 minutes between 10:30pm on the 07-08-2009 and finished at 1:00am on the 08-08-2009. I would have kept going for a while more, but the telescope finally reached its tracking limit – it was bent over backwards (after Jupiter passed its maximum altitude in the sky) and the tube eventually bumped into the tripod. I would have liked to have seen it go a bit longer, but I’m still happy with the results.

The two moons are, from left to right, Europa and Io. If you watch the animation carefully, you can actually see that Europa vanishes from sight before actually passing behind Jupiter. This is because it entered into the planet’s shadow. It was actually really cool – you could see it visibly get dimmer over the course of a few minutes on screen. It’s just too bad that it wasn’t gradual enough to be picked up in the five minute intervals I used. Additionally, Io did the exact same thing just before the telescope tube ran into the tripod – I just missed capturing it on camera. If the telescope had held out for a bit longer, I probably would have also seen Europa coming back into view on the other side of the Moon within a few frames.

Also seen coming into view and transiting the face of the planet is the Great Red Spot. I didn’t plan this animation out before hand – I just went out, set up and pointed the scope to Jupiter. So I was rather lucky to have gotten the GRS just starting to transit as I began capturing data. I was hoping that the recent impact mark would be visible as well at some point, but it never showed up.

I captured each of the images using a 2X Barlow lens – I then resized each of the frames by 150% to get this image scale. I also put them in fames of 640×480 so that they’d work well with YouTube. So it made the file a bit bigger than it needed to be – sorry about that.

Also, I’m not sure about what category I should upload this into … it seems every time I upload an animation I have to put it in a new category because DeviantArt has placed new rules about where to put them. There doesn’t seem to be any category that really suited astrophotography … in the end it looks like the best option for me is ‘Animation and Games => Digital’. The gallery description really doesn’t match what this animation is at all (it’s for images created entirely on the computer, rather than images captured of nature that were made into an animation), but it seems to be the best option I have. I don’t know, what do you guys think?

To create this I captured 30 second AVIs at 5 minute intervals between 10:30pm and 1:00am. I used a 10” F5 Newtonian on a standard EQ6 mount. A 2X Barlow was used and a DMK21AU04.AS was used (at 60 FPS) for capture. Each frame was processed in Registax 5 and centred in the frame using PCFE. Beneton Movie GIF was used to put the animation together as a GIF file.

Description
Warning – Big File!

So I got the motivation last night to go and sit outside in the freezing cold for a few hours in order to make another animation of Jupiter’s rotation. This is the result.

This animation spans exactly 2.5 hours. I captured a 30 second AVI (at 60 FPS) every 5 minutes between 10:30pm on the 07-08-2009 and finished at 1:00am on the 08-08-2009. I would have kept going for a while more, but the telescope finally reached its tracking limit – it was bent over backwards (after Jupiter passed its maximum altitude in the sky) and the tube eventually bumped into the tripod. I would have liked to have seen it go a bit longer, but I’m still happy with the results.

The two moons are, from left to right, Europa and Io. If you watch the animation carefully, you can actually see that Europa vanishes from sight before actually passing behind Jupiter. This is because it entered into the planet’s shadow. It was actually really cool – you could see it visibly get dimmer over the course of a few minutes on screen. It’s just too bad that it wasn’t gradual enough to be picked up in the five minute intervals I used. Additionally, Io did the exact same thing just before the telescope tube ran into the tripod – I just missed capturing it on camera. If the telescope had held out for a bit longer, I probably would have also seen Europa coming back into view on the other side of the Moon within a few frames.

Also seen coming into view and transiting the face of the planet is the Great Red Spot. I didn’t plan this animation out before hand – I just went out, set up and pointed the scope to Jupiter. So I was rather lucky to have gotten the GRS just starting to transit as I began capturing data. I was hoping that the recent impact mark would be visible as well at some point, but it never showed up.

I captured each of the images using a 2X Barlow lens – I then resized each of the frames by 150% to get this image scale. I also put them in fames of 640×480 so that they’d work well with YouTube. So it made the file a bit bigger than it needed to be – sorry about that.

Also, I’m not sure about what category I should upload this into … it seems every time I upload an animation I have to put it in a new category because DeviantArt has placed new rules about where to put them. There doesn’t seem to be any category that really suited astrophotography … in the end it looks like the best option for me is ‘Animation and Games => Digital’. The gallery description really doesn’t match what this animation is at all (it’s for images created entirely on the computer, rather than images captured of nature that were made into an animation), but it seems to be the best option I have. I don’t know, what do you guys think?

To create this I captured 30 second AVIs at 5 minute intervals between 10:30pm and 1:00am. I used a 10” F5 Newtonian on a standard EQ6 mount. A 2X Barlow was used and a DMK21AU04.AS was used (at 60 FPS) for capture. Each frame was processed in Registax 5 and centred in the frame using PCFE. Beneton Movie GIF was used to put the animation together as a GIF file.