Fishing with light tackle - Jupiter w/ a Questar

It is not without some slight trepidation that I post the images below to this forum. When I see the quality of other items posted over the last several months (particularly of Jupiter) it’s apparent that the bar has been set quite high.

But, what the heck, I figure you need to start somewhere . I am now on my third week of attempting to image the planets, and I’m pleased to note that I’ve now progressed to the point (after three prior sessions) that at least now the objects I am imaging are identifiable. This is no small progress; my first images of Saturn were unidentifiable overexposed blobs.

To date I have been using my 1971 Questar 3.5 duplex for these images. From prior visual use I know it is superb optically, and I was curious to see how it would hold up under the demands of planetary imaging. My friend Dan K. images planets with his Questar, and he has provided invaluable counsel and encouragement as I’ve tried to figure things out.

My first attempts to image were with a ToUcam. It actually worked quite well, but the only computer I had available to use with it (a six year old HP laptop with 256meg of RAM) worked OK when capturing the images, but basically melted when I tried to process even the smallest files in Registax.

I had been planning for some time to buy a more current laptop and used this as the impetus to do so. As I discovered, new laptops pretty much only come with Vista, and I could not find a Vista driver for the ToUcam. To make a long story short I decided to get a different imaging camera, and I am now using a Luminera SKYnyx2 color camera with a current HP laptop (with 2 GB of RAM).

In any event, I’ve posted three images of Jupiter, at three different scales. I did pretty much all of the processing in Registax (each image is about 400 frames stacked) and it’s pretty apparent that I haven’t quite figured out how to do this best.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome!

As an aside I do most of my observing in Minnesota, but these Jupiter images were taken this past week while on vacation outside Fort Myers, Florida (I brought my Questar + accessories with me). On the 1 to 10 scale we might use to rate seeing in Minnesota I’d rate the seeing in Florida this week at about 37. I have never seen anything quite like this; at 5:30 in the morning (when I started taking these Jupiter images) the seeing was basically perfect.

The Questar is decidedly not an optimized imaging instrument, but hopefully you can see from these that it is capable of at least decent images.

Thanks and best regards,

Paul Schroeder

Attached Image:

Here's the medium-sized image.

Attached Image:

Here's the large one -

Thanks for any comments,

Paul

Attached Image:

Hi Paul -

These are wonderful shots. Are they captured at different EFLs or is it the same image resized? I own a Questar also but have not used it for many years. I've saved it in anticipation of years when it will be about as much as I can carry around.

Look forward to seeing more of your images on this forum.

clear skies (and good seeing back home) -

Alan

Quite nice for 3.5 inches!! Interesting how much
better these images are than what one could have
taken in 1971 (even with a larger scope).

I'm impressed!

Paul,

That's very nice! I guess visually you can see more than that, as always?

Dmitri

I think it is a great picture. Did you do any processing or did Jupiter look that good through the eyepiece?

Dean

Thanks Paul for these little gems. You have brought encouragement with a reminder of the adage that sometimes less can be more. Take heart with your seeing in Minnesota. The 1 to 10 scale we might use to rate seeing here on the west coast would make Minnesota a 37.

8) 8) Thats a great image!!!