Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

Imaging Jupiter in the morning, imaging Saturn in the evening… it’s been awhile since I’ve been out after dusk and before dawn.

Saturn started low (about 34 degrees altitude) and this one near the end of the run was 41 degrees.. still low.

This was the best 5% of 12K frames each at 15ms. Saturn is just shy of 19 arc seconds large.

Of the 3840*2160 pixels (8.29MP), I used a Region of Interest of 600×600 and a firecapture Cutout box of 400×400 pixels.

The 24 image animation is below, running from 00:18-01:50 utc 2025oct30

A big reminder that 04:00 is much better than 05:00 because the cloud rolled in at 05:00 edt this morning. Ick!
This was the best of 19 imaging runs, using the best 5% of 27K frames, each at 3ms. Jupiter was a quite decent altitude of 58 degrees.
The Great Red Spot is easily seen in the processed version and even showed up in the unprocessed version… seeing and transparency were both “average”, which is much better than normal, which is “poor”.
Note the small white oval above the Great Red Spot, in the dark northern band.
Oh.. and it was -5C this morning here 🙁

Wait.. there is more!

This is the First Light using my new CH4 methane band filter.

I had to remove the UV/IR cut filter as they did not stack one atop the other, and I am not sure if things would have worked out in any event.

I was expecting a little more exposure but was surprised that it was 100X more exposure needed! From 3ms to 300ms!

I processed at the best 5%, 10%, 50%, 75% and 100% of approx 400 frames and settled on 75% as the best results.

The Great Red Spot appear bright in the lower right.

There were high clouds at the time of this imaging run as well. I hope to try again under nocloud skies with maybe 180 seconds in stead of 120, raising the frames from 400 to 600.
Last is the animated .GIF of the mornings session, from 08:15UTC to 10:05UTC, including the methane filter images.

Last nights forecast for this morning showed me 100% high cloud. High cloud is sometimes totally transparent, sometimes totally opaque

At 05:00 edt this morning it was a mixture of both… exposures were about 20-40% higher, so the transparency was poor, plus there were thick clouds moving through the field as well.

This was the best of 15 runs (each run was 180 seconds, approx 25K frames at 4ms each, stacking the best 5%. The Great Red Spot is just exiting on the lower right.

The session ended when Jupiter disappeared completely. I check the findercam as well and it was dark. I ramped up the exposures in case of a little cloud, but still did not see anything. I feared a runaway mount or cable wrap or something like that. Raced outside to find Jupiter totally clouded over.

Below is an attached 2MB animated GIF of the runs as well. Overall a poor imaging session.

And this was the best of 22 runs of imaging Jupiter early this morning. Each run was 180 seconds using an exposure around 3.6ms, a frame rate of 150+ fps
There was a little bit of intermittent cloud and I think that changed the colour balance through the session.
The Great Red Spot was wonderful albeit smaller than ever.
This final processed image was the best 5% of over 28K frames.

Below is a timelapse of the 22 runs.