Mall Astrophotography

September 13, 1999

First light for the QuickCam! I pointed it out my office window, which fortunately allows me an East view, started up the QuickPict software, and took about 10 frames each of Jupiter and later Saturn, along with some dark frames. All of this was done at the ETX prime focus.

jupiter saturn

For Jupiter, the QuickPict Brightness parameter was set to 120. For Saturn it was set to 140. Using PhotoShop, I subtracted a dark frame from each image and then upsampled them by 2. Next, I hand-registered them by putting them in different layers in the same image. I then messed with the colors and brightness levels, as well as applying an unsharp mask filter.

A couple of weeks later, I went back an reprocessed the raw data using my new methods, and came up with these:

jupiter saturn