SharpCap and My Best Jupiter, with Europa as a Bonus

9 Apr 2014.  I don’t normally do much lunar/planetary astrophotography these days because I think deep sky is more interesting (and because my gear is much less well suited to lunar/planetary than it is to deep sky; my focal length is just too short).  However, Mars was just too bright red to pass up.  So I broke out the Logitech c270HD webcam a couple of days ago in an attempt to take advantage of Mars being at opposition.  In addition, I had seen some references to SharpCap (http://www.sharpcap.co.uk/) as a free image capture program for lunar/planetary, so I downloaded it to give it a try.  Mars was the main subject that night, but I got things aligned and tuned up by imaging the Moon and Jupiter while I was waiting for Mars to clear the mountains.  

I love SharpCap and will add that to my toolkit.  It has much better camera control than I'm used to.  I had previously tended to shy away from software that was not Mac-native, but since I got a solid-state drive in my Macbook it has become trivially easy to use VMWare/Windows 7 (the Windows software loads almost instantaneously; with the old hard drive, it seemed to take forever to start up and shut down).  So now I'm not afraid to try out the Windows software, and SharpCap is great.  In addition to better camera control, it also has a focus aid display based on the amount of contrast in your image (which improves as you reach critical focus).  This is a big help for lunar/planetary focusing when the seeing is totally playing havoc with trying to do it visually and I don't want to move off the hard-to-find targets like planets to use a Bhatinov mask on a bright star.  One other feature I really like is SharpCap's ability to take a series of videos of a set duration with an interval in between.  This makes it easy to produce animated GIFs such as the one I took on 7-8 April attempting to show Mars' rotation.

I’m still working on the Moon and Mars images, but here’s one of Jupiter.  I ran the camera at 800 x 600 resolution to improve the frame rate to 15 fps (it only runs at 5 fps at full resolution, which I believe is 1280 x 960).  I didn’t know Europa was in the field of view until I processed the image stack and tried enhancing it.  I also recently learned about RGB alignment in Registax, and that helped with Jupiter but not with Europa (I didn’t know it was there at that point in the processing).  Overall, I think this is my best Jupiter so far; not terrible given the focal length at which I was working.  

Date: 7 Apr 2014, 9:29 PM MDT

Subject: Jupiter with Great Red Spot and Europa

Scope: AT8IN, 3x Barlow stacked (f/12, 2400 mm)

Mount: CG-5

Guiding: none

Camera: Logitech c270 HD at 800 x 600

Acquisition: Sharp Cap 2.1.915.0

Exposure: 120 sec, 15 fps AVI

Stacking: Registax 6, automatic alignpoint selection, best 50 frames/alignpoint

Processing: Registax 6 wavelets, RGB align. CS6 layer mask to make Europa visible without blowing out Jupiter, saturation enhance.



And as a postscript, I just have to mention that yesterday I got word that my November 2013 U.S. National Science Foundation proposal, dealing with a new method of measuring molecular sizes (technically, collision cross sections), has been recommended for funding.  I'm ecstatic about that. This was an unexpected bit of wonderful news.  I knew the proposal contained some really good ideas, but funding for basic science in the U.S. recently has been extremely hard to get (most of us describe the current situation as "toxic"), so I feel very fortunate and look forward to doing more good science.