J5 does Jupiter one more time

[Bilko]

I was interested to see how far I could push my J5/4 inch refractor combination, so last week I added a TC201 to my existing TC14E to give a final 2520mm at ~f/25 (35mm equivalent 6804mm).

On Monday night Jupiter was the closest it will be to earth in 2016, and its moons were also in a nice arrangement, with Europa starting a transit and casting its shadow on the main planet around half an hour before midnight when Jupiter was almost at its highest in the sky.

I took 2 minutes of 4k video at 1/60th and iso 400, which gave just enough light to get a reasonable exposure and get all the moons in the frame (you'll need to go to full size gallery view to see the moons). The final image was from stacking 1200 frames from the video .


Evostar 100ED/TC14E/TC201/FT-1/J5 4k video 1200 frames stacked in Registax

100% crop


Jupiter and moons Io on the left, Europa starting transit with shadow directly beneath

The Great Red Spot was unfortunately round the back of Jupiter on this occasion and so not visible.

 

[Tord S Eriksson]

I was interested to see how far I could push my J5/4 inch refractor combination, so last week I added a TC201 to my existing TC14E to give a final 2520mm at ~f/25 (35mm equivalent 6804mm).

On Monday night Jupiter was the closest it will be to earth in 2016, and its moons were also in a nice arrangement, with Europa starting a transit and casting its shadow on the main planet around half an hour before midnight when Jupiter was almost at its highest in the sky.

I took 2 minutes of 4k video at 1/60th and iso 400, which gave just enough light to get a reasonable exposure and get all the moons in the frame (you'll need to go to full size gallery view to see the moons). The final image was from stacking 1200 frames from the video .


Evostar 100ED/TC14E/TC201/FT-1/J5 4k video 1200 frames stacked in Registax

100% crop


Jupiter and moons Io on the left, Europa starting transit with shadow directly beneath

The Great Red Spot was unfortunately round the back of Jupiter on this occasion and so not visible.

Impressive!

--
Tord_2 (at) photographer (dot) net
Mostly Nikon V1, V2, & D600, user

 

[FDD5]

wow! thats an impressive result .., It's been a while since I've seen such images, but in my memory the webcams usually used for this don't approach this quality ?, the seeing must have been really good also?

 

[Timmyjoe]

Wow, that is REALLY impressive. I'm not sure I've ever seen Jupiter in the night sky, much less taken a picture like that. Great job, and thanks for sharing.

 

[Bilko]

wow! thats an impressive result .., It's been a while since I've seen such images, but in my memory the webcams usually used for this don't approach this quality ?, the seeing must have been really good also?

Thanks. I'm fairly new to this so don't have any direct experience of webcams, but I believe they are also capable of giving good results. What the J5 is nice for is the relatively large 4k field of view with the 3840 x 2160 frame size and the extra magnification from the small pixels. A webcam image of jupiter at the same size would probably have missed the two outer moons.

The seeing was reasonably good, but had been very poor earlier in the evening when Jupiter was lower down in the sky. Lots of blurry images and strange colours when I came to do the processing.

 

[Sonyshine]

Most impressive.......shame I recently sold my telescope!

 

[wolfd]

Superb shots !!!

 

[DWL-P]

Excellent stuff, that's a lot of mm, you have used there, very well done indeed.

 

[Bilko]

Excellent stuff, that's a lot of mm, you have used there, very well done indeed.

Thanks to all for the comments.

You're right about there being a lot of mm, it brings home how small these things are. At 44 arcseconds across Jupiter is about 1/40th the size of the moon at the moment, and Jupiter's satellites are about 1/40th smaller again (although actually similar in size to our own moon).

Jupiter is about 220 pixels across in the image, which corresponds to 5 pixels per arcsecond. In astronomical terms the f/25 telescope-J5 pixel size combination is on the 'oversampled' side for a point of light such as a star, but not too bad for planetary detail. I live in hope of some better skies.

 

[Brandon birder]

Amazing. Thanks for sharing.

 

[maddeye]

Well this thread is a little old, but I hope you are still reading this -

Could you share some Information how you made this picture? I tried a Mak90 at 1250mm wirh a 2x Barlow, which should gather about as much light as your scope.

But using ISO400, I see almost nothing - also you state you were using 1/60, but my J5 (and all other Nikon 1's) do have a 1/100 limit for Video (or is there some setting Im missing?) Did dou underexpose rhat bad and rised exposure after stacking? But with that Exposure I am not able to align thw pictures...^^

Using higher ISO's (3200-6400) I am unable to produce a sharp image, when when stacking 3000 images.

Without the barlow I get better results actually (at ISO 400-800), but still miles away from your image.

 

[sfortis]

Well this thread is a little old, but I hope you are still reading this -

Could you share some Information how you made this picture? I tried a Mak90 at 1250mm wirh a 2x Barlow, which should gather about as much light as your scope.

But using ISO400, I see almost nothing - also you state you were using 1/60, but my J5 (and all other Nikon 1's) do have a 1/100 limit for Video (or is there some setting Im missing?) Did dou underexpose rhat bad and rised exposure after stacking? But with that Exposure I am not able to align thw pictures...^^

Using higher ISO's (3200-6400) I am unable to produce a sharp image, when when stacking 3000 images.

Without the barlow I get better results actually (at ISO 400-800), but still miles away from your image.

Hi maddeye,

choose 60hz flicker reduction and you'll got 1/60.

 

[Bilko]

Hi Maddeye,

Yes, as sfortis mentioned, if you choose 60Hz flicker reduction you can get down to 1/60 shutter speed in the 4k video, this is what I did.

I did try higher iso settings, but found that iso400 gave the best final results.

Jupiter was exactly at opposition when I took my pictures (and I stayed up until it was at its highest in the sky on that evening), so I guess would have been brighter than it is now.

Even so, the video I got was very dim - here's a crop from a single frame from the video. I almost gave up at this stage when I first tried to get pictures of Jupiter.


Crop from single frame from 4k video 1/60th iso400

I ran the video through PIPP to crop the image and do quality estimation (chose 1200 frames out of 1800 for a 2min video) and create an AVI, using the settings:

'Stretch White Point to 75%'

'Equalize RG&B channels individually'.


PIPP processing options

This made a big difference to the brightness:


Crop from single frame from AVI produced by PIPP

Then the 1200 frames of the AVI were stacked in Registax:


1200 frame AVI Stacked in Registax but not sharpened

This was then wavelet sharpened in Registax (which makes another huge difference, always amazes me), followed by some final adjustments in DXO Optics Pro and Photoshop to give the final images at the top of this post.

Hope this helps.

Well this thread is a little old, but I hope you are still reading this -

Could you share some Information how you made this picture? I tried a Mak90 at 1250mm wirh a 2x Barlow, which should gather about as much light as your scope.

But using ISO400, I see almost nothing - also you state you were using 1/60, but my J5 (and all other Nikon 1's) do have a 1/100 limit for Video (or is there some setting Im missing?) Did dou underexpose rhat bad and rised exposure after stacking? But with that Exposure I am not able to align thw pictures...^^

Using higher ISO's (3200-6400) I am unable to produce a sharp image, when when stacking 3000 images.

Without the barlow I get better results actually (at ISO 400-800), but still miles away from your image.

 

[IVN]

This is some seriously impressive stuff!

Hi Maddeye,

Yes, as sfortis mentioned, if you choose 60Hz flicker reduction you can get down to 1/60 shutter speed in the 4k video, this is what I did.

I did try higher iso settings, but found that iso400 gave the best final results.

Jupiter was exactly at opposition when I took my pictures (and I stayed up until it was at its highest in the sky on that evening), so I guess would have been brighter than it is now.

Even so, the video I got was very dim - here's a crop from a single frame from the video. I almost gave up at this stage when I first tried to get pictures of Jupiter.


Crop from single frame from 4k video 1/60th iso400

I ran the video through PIPP to crop the image and do quality estimation (chose 1200 frames out of 1800 for a 2min video) and create an AVI, using the settings:

'Stretch White Point to 75%'

'Equalize RG&B channels individually'.


PIPP processing options

This made a big difference to the brightness:


Crop from single frame from AVI produced by PIPP

Then the 1200 frames of the AVI were stacked in Registax:


1200 frame AVI Stacked in Registax but not sharpened

This was then wavelet sharpened in Registax (which makes another huge difference, always amazes me), followed by some final adjustments in DXO Optics Pro and Photoshop to give the final images at the top of this post.

Hope this helps.

Well this thread is a little old, but I hope you are still reading this -

Could you share some Information how you made this picture? I tried a Mak90 at 1250mm wirh a 2x Barlow, which should gather about as much light as your scope.

But using ISO400, I see almost nothing - also you state you were using 1/60, but my J5 (and all other Nikon 1's) do have a 1/100 limit for Video (or is there some setting Im missing?) Did dou underexpose rhat bad and rised exposure after stacking? But with that Exposure I am not able to align thw pictures...^^

Using higher ISO's (3200-6400) I am unable to produce a sharp image, when when stacking 3000 images.

Without the barlow I get better results actually (at ISO 400-800), but still miles away from your image.

--
Blog: http://bigstreetguns.com/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26344495@N05/

 

[maddeye]

Thank you for sharing all the details - seeing the before/after pictures will greatly help to estimate if one is going into the right direction!

Wish I knew PIPP before, thinking on how much time I spent trying different AVI and video-to-jpeg-Converters... Thanks for that tipp as well.

 

[DaveR43]

Hi Maddeye,

Yes, as sfortis mentioned, if you choose 60Hz flicker reduction you can get down to 1/60 shutter speed in the 4k video, this is what I did.

I did try higher iso settings, but found that iso400 gave the best final results.

Jupiter was exactly at opposition when I took my pictures (and I stayed up until it was at its highest in the sky on that evening), so I guess would have been brighter than it is now.

Even so, the video I got was very dim - here's a crop from a single frame from the video. I almost gave up at this stage when I first tried to get pictures of Jupiter.


Crop from single frame from 4k video 1/60th iso400

I ran the video through PIPP to crop the image and do quality estimation (chose 1200 frames out of 1800 for a 2min video) and create an AVI, using the settings:

'Stretch White Point to 75%'

'Equalize RG&B channels individually'.


PIPP processing options

This made a big difference to the brightness:


Crop from single frame from AVI produced by PIPP

Then the 1200 frames of the AVI were stacked in Registax:


1200 frame AVI Stacked in Registax but not sharpened

This was then wavelet sharpened in Registax (which makes another huge difference, always amazes me), followed by some final adjustments in DXO Optics Pro and Photoshop to give the final images at the top of this post.

Hope this helps.

Well this thread is a little old, but I hope you are still reading this -

Could you share some Information how you made this picture? I tried a Mak90 at 1250mm wirh a 2x Barlow, which should gather about as much light as your scope.

But using ISO400, I see almost nothing - also you state you were using 1/60, but my J5 (and all other Nikon 1's) do have a 1/100 limit for Video (or is there some setting Im missing?) Did dou underexpose rhat bad and rised exposure after stacking? But with that Exposure I am not able to align thw pictures...^^

Using higher ISO's (3200-6400) I am unable to produce a sharp image, when when stacking 3000 images.

Without the barlow I get better results actually (at ISO 400-800), but still miles away from your image.

Hi Bilko,

Thanks for the detail on your process.

I saw your other thread (http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/57331535) and your gallery pages with another image of Jupiter and its moons and also the Earth's moon, truly fantastic.

Is your telescope this model?

Sky-Watcher Evostar-100ED DS PRO Fluorite Apochromatic Refractor OTA

I see it is £674 from Wex in the UK.

--
DaveR

 

[Bilko]

Yes, that's the one. I got mine from First Light Optics in the UK.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is your telescope this model?
Sky-Watcher Evostar-100ED DS PRO Fluorite Apochromatic Refractor OTA

I see it is £674 from Wex in the UK.

--
DaveR

 

[DaveR43]

Yes, that's the one. I got mine from First Light Optics in the UK.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is your telescope this model?

Sky-Watcher Evostar-100ED DS PRO Fluorite Apochromatic Refractor OTA

I see it is £674 from Wex in the UK.

 

[Stefan BW]

Jupiter and moons Io on the left, Europa starting transit with shadow directly beneath

The Great Red Spot was unfortunately round the back of Jupiter on this occasion and so not visible.

No problem, we have Hubble photos showing the Spot. Getting such a photo with a low-cost equipment is incredible, and you've put an admirable effort into creating it.

 

[QVee]

Bilko,

this is most impressive work I've ever encouter and beyond my capabilities for sure.

but good to know that with J5 one can accomplish such awesome image

TFS

NASA are you looking at this? maybe save billions in space probes

:-D;-)