So on the 11th the clouds parted and I was able to get the scope out for a play.  After setting up and aligning, the first target for the evening was of course Jupiter.  This was also the first chance to try out the ASI120MC-S camera “in the wild” so I was definately interested in how it would perform.

The initial line up and focusing was visually through a 20mm eye piece to give a 30x magnification.  Jupiter and the 4 Galilean moons were clearly visible although rather small.  It was just possible to make out jupiters bands at this image scale and the 4 moons were clearly visible on either side of the planet.

The next step was to introduce a 2x barlow into the image train.  After focusing the bands were now clearly visible.   After enduring Jupiter was centered in the field of view it was then time to swap out the eyepiece for the ASI120MC-S planetary camera and fire up the FireCapture software to run it..

As the planet was brought into focus it was necessary to progressively turn down the image capture time in order to compensate for the brightening of the image.  Once focused the best that I could manage I was surprised at the level of detail that was apparent even at this image scale.  The ED80 is most definately not suited to planetary work, however it still provides pleasing views and adequate images.

Following standard planetary imaging practice I took short videos (around 30 seconds each).  At 30 fps and full resolution (1024×720) this amount to 900 frames and a file size of 1.2GB.  Applying the Castrator program to crop the frames of the video down brought this to a more managable  0.5GB.

This castrated video was then loaded into AutoStakkert!2 which works by seperating and analysing the quality of each frame, while aligning the image between the various frames to counter any drift.  I selected for the best 25% of the frames to be used for the final stack, which produced the following images.

It was only once I got to this point that I realised I had forgotten one key step –  the camera being used is supposed to be colour but the image was only coming at as monochrome !.  It turns out that in FireCapture it is necessary to tell the program to debayer (colourize) the video ! Well at least I know for next time .