I attempted to do some lucky imaging of Jupiter using a permanent installation (Celestron 14" SCT + Paramount ME II) and Nikon D5600 attached directly to a Baader Hyperion 8-24mm eyepiece (without a filter). The atmospheric conditions weren't ideal (65% humidity, 2 m/s winds), the telescope was properly acclimated prior to use, and Jupiter was around 17 degrees elevation during imaging.
After processing 3600 frames (from 1 minute of video1 at 60 fps) with Autostakkert 3 and then aligning the RGB channels and recomposing I got these:
Left (or top if your screen is small) is using 20% of the stack, right is using 50%. Since this is my first foray into planetary imaging my question is: is this result reasonable given the setup used and atmospheric conditions described?2
I'm asking because I've seen much better results from people using smaller telescopes. I think the discrepancy is the result of one (or several) of the following:
- Something is wrong with the equipment I used.
- I'm using the wrong equipment.
- I'm not processing the images correctly.
- This is the best the equipment could do under those conditions.
and I'm trying to rule out number 1.
Here is a single, unprocessed frame for reference:
1 Note that the video in the link has been compressed through ffmpeg using the H.265 codec with CRF of 25.
2 This result is just one example - I did 30 minutes of imaging in 3 minute segments over the course of several hours, applying the same process to other sets of exposures yielded similar results.