Thoughts on the logistics.....how many imagers required Great Red Spot (GRS) movie project · Niall MacNeill · ... · 6 · 130 · 0

I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew with this project. ;-) It will be a real challenge to make it happen. I would like to work by consensus since there is no way I have all the answers and the more ideas we have on how to make it happen the more likely we will succeed. I hope you all think the effort will be worthwhile. Thanks also for conducting this in English as I know that for many of you English is not your native tongue, although having read many of your posts I would say many speak English as well as I do. 

I was giving some further thought to logistics. Firstly, I would say we would want to get a good quality image each GRS rotation into view. This means enough imagers  in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, so that when it is happening in the daylight hours for one hemisphere, it will be at night for the other. The concept of "Hemispheres" is a bit artificial and ideally we would want imagers spread round the globe. But for the purposes of the argument let's say we would need 2 Hemispheres covered off. Given the assumption, which I know is the case that you are extremely competent imagers of Jupiter, then 4 things have to happen to ensure we get at least one good image. 1) you have to available, 2) the weather has to be clear  3) the seeing has to be good or excellent and 4) there has to be enough people to cover risks 1) -  3). Of course the above factors are massively dependent on your location. So in the Central West of Australia, we may have clear conditions 50% of the time. In Northern Europe it might only be 20%. However for the purposes of this exercise I am going to make some wild guesses for global averages and please feel free to disagree.

Firstly let's assume that you are available 4/5 of the evenings, so 1) = 0.8. Secondly that there is a 2/5 chance of the weather being clear so 2) = 0.4 and finally that 1 time in 4 the seeing is good enough so 3) = 0.25. Therefor the average probability that a given imager can get a good image of Jupiter = 0.8*0.4*0.25 = 0.08 or 1 chance in 12.5. I don't know about you but that seems reasonable to me.

Therefore there is a ( 1-0.08 ) = 92% chance of not producing a good image. If there is a 2nd imager in a different location to have entirely different risks, the chances that both imagers can't produce an image is 0.9^2 = 0.81. In Boolean algebra AND gates are multiplicative. Therefore for n imagers the probability of not getting an image in (0.92)^n. If we want there to be no more than a 5% chance of no-one getting an image, how big does n have to be.  (0.92)^n =0.05. n = log(0.05)/log(0.92) =  36

For both Hemispheres....or around the globe we would need 72 imagers, if my assumptions and mathematics are correct. Yikes!!!!

Does anyone disagree? Does this make the idea infeasible?

Hi Almir, I had indeed heard of the Swedish Group's work but not that of the 91 imagers. Interesting that they used a number not too far off my estimate of what would be required. These results are awesome I must say. Perhaps we should start with a small group of imagers Australians and Brazilians…lol and in a timeframe do the best we can to image the planet with the GRS to the front. and see what we can do by combining our mages even if there are gaps. Another alternative would be to take the images we've produced over this timeframe and try to produce a movie from them, albeit with gaps.

So, lets go for it!

It will be a great challenge, and another legal aspect is that we can exchange experience with astrophotographers from all over the world.