From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: September 1, 2010 9:26:04 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Jupiter?

Hi Jim,

You latest image has some very good detail.

Seeing is like personality - there are so many subtle variations. Two nights ago we had popcorn seeing, where the image pops into sharp focus for brief moments from an otherwise unfocused mess during most of the capture. When the image was in focus, the shape was very stable. This sort of data responds very well to accurate alignment and stacking from my experience. Last night the seeing was very different... good contrast and sharpness through much of the video, but with quite a lot of shape deformation - especially at the edges of the planet. I just tried a quick sample, but I'm expecting software to have a much harder time aligning this date for a sharply processed result.

Contrast in the red is low at this point in time. I'd suggest pumping up the contrast a bit in your capture settings to give the software a little more help with alignment. I used a gamma setting of 1.30 - 1.40 both last night and two nights ago. 

I've uploaded a file with a single good red frame, a red processed image and a green processed image from 8-30-10:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Planetary/Jupiter_RG.jpg 

good luck out there!

Alan

On Sep 1, 2010, at 9:28 AM, jimchung2338 wrote:

Well, seeing was predicted to be near perfect this morning in the Lake Ontario region and from an imaging perspective it does seem to have been better than past days. However nothing to be excited about since there only appears to be an incremental improvement in my images. I'm still not able to resolve the fine festoons in the NEB and EB. My red images seems to suffer loss of contrast as compared to my blue and green and I wonder if I'm losing data in the R channel due to a filter issue. Then again I might also be bumping up against the poor figure of a mass produced mirror. I'm fairly confidant that my collimation is accurate.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4852049/JupiterVGseeingdropbx.jpg

Jim