That... is snazzy! I have no idea what I'm doing at this point - I'm literally pushing buttons, moving sliders and making all sorts of educated guesses. But, I mean, even looking at that is comparable to what I'd see in the eyepiece.
Anyway, fast forwarding ahead to later that night, I managed to take some footage of Jupiter. Now I should point out that the way this kind of astrophotgraphy works is that the camera takes hundreds (if not thousands) of brief frames, stacks and averages them. Its completely different than taking one long exposure. The stacking and averaging gets rid of a lot of the noise in the photograph. After numerous false starts with Autostackkert! I come up with this result:
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| Jupiter plus the Galilean moons (from left to right)- Europa, Io and Ganymede.. |
Which I thought was pretty great. Autostakkert is one of the two main software people use to compile these photos. The other was Registax. It took some additional finagling to get Registax to work (including processing some of my runs through PIPP first). But in the end (about an hour later), I got this:
RegiStax is a more complicated piece of software that gives you finer control over the end result. In this case, I've over-processed the final photo somewhat, but I wound up with an additional bright spot past Europa. A quick check back to last night with Stellarium and it's apparently the fourth Galilean moon - Callisto.
This photo is oriented correctly (i.e. it's what you'd see if you were looking directly at Jupiter without a telescope). The moons, from L to R are:
Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto.
(it'll be interesting to come back to this raw data in six months to see how my post-processing skills have improved!)



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