Jupiter's Moons Rising

[Hankmeister3]

When skies are permitting here in central Illinois, I'll mount up my Meade 10 inch or my SkyMax 180mm f/15 Maksutov and attempt some planetary or lunar photography. In this instance Jupiter and its four moons fell victim to my Meade 10-inch f/10 at prime focus at 2500mm focal length. Skies were about Pickering 5, transparency was lower yet but over all seeing conditions allowed me to capture a nice string of fifty exposures of varying lengths at ISO 200. I purposefully over-exposed Jupiter by one to two stops (my terrestrial photography jargon is popping out having been a photo editor of a national collegiate newspaper back in the early 1980s in San Clemente, CA) in hopes of capturing good, hard images of Jupiter's four moons. In post-production I backed off the luminance (or gain) levels commensurately of Jupiter itself and played with the contrast and saturation levels until I got a pleasant enough image of Jupiter. I was pretty happy with the results and so I'm posting it here.

The scale isn't the greatest because of the separation distances of the outer moons, but if you patrol the lower left and upper right of the image you'll find the other two. I was very pleased with how tightly the moons were imaged. Image was captured with my unmodified Canon EOS 80D DSLR on 7/18/19. Single-frame, no filters.

[Don Quixote]

First time to see this one Henry.
Pretty nice red spot on Jupe !

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks, Marcus. I thought I emailed this image to you. Oh well, that's what I get for thinking!

What I did to capture that image was basically over expose Jupiter by about "two stops". In camera lingo, as you well now, that means instead of exposing at 1/60th of a second for a proper exposure I exposed at 1/15th of a second. This helped capture some good hard images of Jupiter's four moons without blowing out Jupiter so much that I couldn't bring it back. Then in post-production I isolated Jupiter with my "magic pencil" feature (heh!) and ran the luminance/gain slider way down until I was able to get Jupiter to look normally exposed. There were a few contrast artifacts that popped up, but I thought it all worked to good effect. I can't remember when I captured this image but the single frame photo's meta-data would certainly reveal that.

I can't remember which moon was where at the time this image was captured. Plus, the time readout on both my cameras are generally off by many minutes if not several hours though the date is generally correct. I don't know why that is but I try to update the time-stamp about once every …. hmmm, six months!

Oh, wait, I just checked my original post … doh! I captured Jup on 7/18 of this year. And seeing conditions were about average, about a Pickering 4 out of 10. Darkness and transparency wasn't an issue for planetary imaging especially when you're only pegging a 4 on seeing conditions.

[Ozypic]

Its a nice image for sure. Seeing those moons so nicely is the icing on the cake . Thanks for sharing it with us . Phill

[Thefatkitty]

Well done Henry, nice scope to boot!

All the best,

[Graeme1858]

What I did to capture that image was basically over expose Jupiter by about "two stops". In camera lingo, as you well now, that means instead of exposing at 1/60th of a second for a proper exposure I exposed at 1/15th of a second. This helped capture some good hard images of Jupiter's four moons without blowing out Jupiter so much that I couldn't bring it back. Then in post-production I isolated Jupiter with my "magic pencil" feature (heh!) and ran the luminance/gain slider way down until I was able to get Jupiter to look normally exposed. There were a few contrast artifacts that popped up, but I thought it all worked to good effect. I can't remember when I captured this image but the single frame photo's meta-data would certainly reveal that.

Thanks for the information Hank. My Jupiter images are either no moons visible or moons visible and the planet over exposed. I'll have another go next year!

Regards

Graeme

[Shabadoo]

You got the GRS! Congrats!

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks everyone. This was one of those few times when you burn a few extra frames without a lot of expectation just because there's an opportunity to do so. I didn't realize how nicely this would turn out or how well Jupiter can be brought back after a one to two stop overexposure. I wish it had been better seeing conditions because it would have been nice to get a little bit more detail in the Jovian belts. Yes, capturing the GRS was a bonus!