Please feel free to disagree with any of this. I am just soliciting feedback on the right way forward.
EQUIPMENT
TELESCOPES
From what I can see, you will need to have at least 100mm (8"
objective diameter to produce sufficient resolution. Does anyone object to setting a 100mm minimum to participate? Of course larger is better.FOCAL LENGTH MULTIPLIER
Next Focal Length. I believe the best results are achieved when the focal length you are imaging at is consistent with a pixel resolution at 1/3rd the Dawes limit of your scope or thereabouts. This determines the focal length multiplier you need. Since you are all producing superb resolutions, no doubt you already have this right. To calculate the optimal focal length multiplier for a scope, it is equal to 618 x camera pixel size (microns)/ {Telescope FL (mm) x Dawes Limit of scope (arc secs) }. Lower means under sampling and not achieving the highest resolution achievable with speckle imaging when the seeing is excellent. Higher means oversampling and a dimmer image/ lower frame rates.
Monochrome with colour filters will yield somewhat higher resolutions but OSC cameras also produce very good results.
The Mount just needs to be good enough to hold the planet roughly within the FOV as Autostakkert will centralise the image.
SOFTWARE
WINJUPOS
I was thinking that we should use WinJUPOS as the software platform to capture, de-rotate and manage the images and the animations/ movies we want to create. Given we will all be producing images at different times and at different rotations, WinJUPOS should have the capability of accepting any image, of scaling it to a consistent size and orientation so that any movies we produce will have a consistent look.
Whilst I was suggesting producing images with the GRS central, perhaps we should simply aim to image with the GRS central, but any colour image produced either from a OSC camera or through RGB combination can be loaded into WinJUPOS. This will give us a larger data set. IT IS THEREFORE ESSENTIAL THAT FILE NAMING PROTOCOLS FOLLOW THOSE REQUIRED BY WINJUPOS BASED ON UTC. Does that make sense?
If you use Firecapture as your capture software, videos can automatically be configured with the WinJUPOS naming protocols. I think most of us use Autostakkert to quality assess and stack images and RegiStax to sharpen them. These sharpened images will carry forward the WinJUPOS file naming protocols and can be easily be manipulated further. These sharpened files are the data we will need for the project.
Do we need to do anything around image size, to make it easier to integrate images. Would it make sense to stipulate for example a Region Of Interest (ROI) size within Firecapture when imaging?
Submitted images will need to be assessed for quality. We need to develop protocols to carry out this assessment so that images are accepted or rejected. This needs to be a consensus process that could engender disengagement unless managed well. Where two or more images are taken in the same timeframe the best will need to be determined. Similarly if there is only one image for a given timeframe but the quality is debatable, whether it is retained or rejected needs to be determined.
Please come back to me on this.
Cheers,
Niall
