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After experimenting with webcam astronomy for the past couple of months, I thought it was time for
a 'project'. Looking ahead on the calendar of Jovian phenomena, I could see that a cool event would occur on March 22, 2004. On that night, I would be able to see two satellite shadows on the planet. Then the two moons causing the shadows would drift off of the planet's limb. Midway through the event, the Great Red Spot would make its way across Jupiter's face.
I could not begin before 7:00p.m. because the planet was still behind the trees. At 7:15p.m., I
started to collect my data. A ToUcam Pro II PCV840K webcam was hooked up to a Celestron 11" SCT equipped with an Ultima 2x barlow. The video signal was sent indoors to my basement office. I could view the event on my computer. At precise fifteen-minute intervals, I took a 15 second video clip. The capture rate was at 30 frames per second. A second clip was saved at 10 frames per second. I continued doing this for four hours, until 11:15p.m. At the end of the night I had collected 4 GIGA-bytes of .avi files for a total of 10,200 images!!
Then came the tedious stuff. I had to find the best 25 images from each video capture and
process them to perfect each movie 'segment'. For this procedure, I used K3CCD Tools, Registax 2, and Photo Shop. I had to make sure that each result looked similar, so the movie would look fairly smooth. Then I had to get creative and find a way to place Jupiter in exactly the same spot in each individual .jpg file. This took hours!! Finally, when I had the 17 parts composed, I strung them together in an animation using Paint Shop Pro. You see the result above.
I have wanted to make this type of 'movie' for a long time. Altogether, it took about 4½ hours to
collect the video and another 10 hours to sift throught the images, process them, and produce an animation. The result is worth it!! I had a lot of fun trying to work through all the traps and bugs. I've never made one of these before. What you see above is 40% of a day on Jupiter sped up 3388.235 times!! That is, four hours of motion shown in 4.25 seconds. Hmmm, so I guess it took me nearly 15 hours to make a 4-second movie... |
