This is my best photograph of Jupiter so far. I took it through my homemade Lurie-Houghton telescope the evening of 25 January 2002. The seeing was quite variable that night so I used my Logitech Quickcam VC in the movie mode and used a variety of image processing tools to create the image seen here.
To make this image, I used a Logitech Quickcam VCweb-cam type of camera along with a combination of a 2.4X Vernonscope barlow lens with a Meade short 2X barlow lens. The Lurie-Houghton's focal length and f-ratio is 1154mm at f/4.63. The complete setup is like using a 5540mm f/22.2 lens. I used the Antechinus Media Editor to extract all of the video frames to a series of BMP files and then used AstroStack to align, select, and combine the images. I also used the unsharp masking and deconvolution algorithims in AstroStack to sharpen up the image. For the final image seen here, I used Adobe Photoshop to crop, slightly increase the color saturation and convert the image to the jpeg format. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 26 January 2002