Jupiter 10/22/11 - My Best So Far

With Jupiter's opposition a little over a week away, I wanted to make sure I imaged during the next clear night that I was able.  The 22th was that night.  I was out for 2 different sessions.  The first session the sky had a thin layer of cloud which impaired the view somewhat.  Later in the evening, transparency improved substantially, and was able to take the best pictures to date.  I was also using the refractor, as I did some work on the dob, so the mirror was not aligned.

This image was taken during the first series under hazy sky.

This image was taken during the second session.  I had taken 3 AVI's during the 2nd session, ranging from 250 frames to 600 frames.  This is the 250 frame AVI.
The moons visible from top to bottom are Europa, Io and Callisto.

This next image is the 3rd image of the set, with 500 frames.  Seeing was also excellent, and Registax was set to use the best 90% of the frames - ALL of the frames were used with that setting.  Notice the detail in the equatorial zone.  I am seeing pink ovals in that area.  There is also detail visible in the NEB as well as the SEB.  This was a quick processing job, being I was excited to see what I had captured.  There is some onion skinning along the outer limb, but this next image, processed from the same AVI minimizes that effect.  I used different processing values, and also I did some color correction in Photoshop on this image as well:

As with all pictures in this blog, if you click the individual photo, you will see them in actual size.  This image I believe is my best Jupiter image to date.