Jupiter – March 5, 2016

It has been a very, very long time since my last Jupiter shot, back on November 14, 2015.

But I did get a chance to image the planet a few days ago, when the cirrus clouds allowed for some rather steady skies, which is a bit unusual in February for my location. When I say “steady”it does not mean that the seeing was excellent, but for a few brief seconds I had some very nice views on the laptop screen with the giant of our Solar System. The seeing was around 6 to 7/10. Not bad, but Jupiter requires some very steady conditions in order to image the very small and intricate details in its atmosphere. Plus, another problem: the very humid location allowed for some fog to form, and also a lot of dew on the secondary mirror of the scope; this forced me to go quite high with the gain setting, and thus adding a lot of noise to the images…

Nevertheless, one view:

And a more detailed version, with the Red channel also shown:

Hope to get more shots in the coming weeks, as the planet is just a few days past opposition. Maybe the Earth’s atmosphere will cooperate…

UPDATE:

A soft processing of the above image.