Jupiter Spinning

Jupiter is finally highest in the sky at a reasonable time of night, which means it’s the perfect time to spend a few hours outside catching a time lapse of the planets rotation!

I’ve taken this shot many times before with different cameras, but this was the first one with my new planetary camera. I took two minute videos every 5 minutes which ended up being 181GB of hard drive space after an hour! Each video was stacked in Autostakkert, sharpened with wavelets in Registax, and combined into a video in Windows Movie Maker.

While taking video I set Firecapture to keep only the region of interest so I could increase my frame rate and not worry about capturing empty space.

One hour’s rotation is quite a bit considering a day on Jupiter is only about 10 hours. Thankfully we also get to see the moon Io starting to cross the face of the planet. There are some strange vertical line artifacts on the right side of the planet that I’m not totally sure what to do with, interestingly they’re in the same spot for each image.

By photographing this much planet rotation I can also map a fair amount of the surface in WinJUPOS.

I obviously have a bit more to go before I can say I’ve mapped the entire surface, but it’s a great first step! The animation is better quality than I’ve managed before, but the image below is the best of the bunch.