Jupiters-satellites-20060407

Learned something interesting this morning: At 1X the magnification of the ToUCam SPC900NC in the 1,200mm SV152 apo the diagonal measure of the field of view is just a tad over 12 arc-minutes. I figured that by looking up the positions of Jupiter's 4 Galilean satellites after making this composite image. It's two images, each from separate 600-frame AVI files. The first image is properly exposed for the moons, which blows out Jupiter. From the second image, I clipped out the properly exposed Jupiter and then pasted it into the center of the overexposed blob on the first image. A little judicious airbrushing with the same background color quieted down the noise and removed a slight "halo" from around Jupiter. Callisto is just barely visible in the extreme upper right-hand corner. This image is reversed right-to-left from a normal "map" view (West is to the right). North is in the direction of the word "Jupiter" in the title. This is what it looked like in binoculars this morning.

 

This image was used in NASA's What's Up? for June 2007:

education.jpl.nasa.gov/amateurastronomy/index.html

 

Scope and mount supplied by 3RF (see www.3rf.org).

Done