Jupiter's Moons in Motion - Mike Salway

Blogged by Jonathan Maron on May 28, 2008 and tagged with Sample Images, Jupiter, Moon, Animation.

Following on from yesterday's blog, Mike Salway again has submitted some more of his work.

In his e-mail to The Imaging Source, Mike writes:

Callisto, moving towards Jupiter, is casting the shadow on Jupiter in the first few frames. Europa and Io are in a close pairing, moving away from Jupiter.

I was lucky enough that Callisto was just close enough to Jupiter so that I could capture a reference frame to pinpoint the Moon's position relative to Jupiter. I could then capture a separate set of AVI's with the 3 moons in the same Field of View. This was repeated 5 times throughout the session to get the data for the animation.

Jupiter's 8-frame animation was tricky to align in terms of limbs and colour balance, because the first 4 frames were captured in poorer seeing at 30fps with a decreasing histogram due to the mirrors fogging up. The last 4 frames were captured at 15fps with a much fuller histogram in improved seeing.

Captured with a 12″ newt and DMK 21AU04. Processed in Registax v5 (beta), Astra Image, Photoshop and Jasc Animation Shop.

Click on the following image for the original animation:

Again, keep up the good work, Mike!

-