Jupiter and Moons: This is my first effort at imaging a planet--Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, and three of its four Galilean moons (from left to right: Europa, Io and Ganymede). When this picture was taken, Jupiter was almost at its closest to Earth, about 390 million miles away. Jupiter has a diameter of almost 90,000 miles (compared to the Earth's diameter of just under 8,000 miles).

Technical Information:

LRGB: I took 30 images through each of clear, red, green and blue filters. Each clea-filtered exposure was .11 seconds; each red and green was .2 seconds; and each blue was .32 seconds. All images were unbinned.

Equipment: 10" LX200 at f/12, and an SBIG ST-7E camera/CFW-8 color filter wheel.

Image Acquisition/Camera Control: CCDSoft V5.

Processing: No calibration performed; images aligned in AIP4WIN. Images average combined in Ray Gralak's sigma reject program. Five iterations of Richardson-Lucy applied in AIP4WIN. Unsharp mask performed in Photoshop 6. Color combine, adjustment of curves, brightness and contrast performed in Photoshop 6.0. Finally, the image was bicubically resized to a bit over three times its original linear dimensions in Photoshop, another unsharp mask was performed, and then the image was bicubically resized to slightly more than twice its original linear dimensions.

Location: My yard in Redmond, Washington, elevation 500'.

Date: All images taken during the night of 2/6/03.

CCD Temperature: -30C

Moon Phase: Day 5; waxing crescent

Copyright Mark de Regt, 2003