Observation Report, Jupiter and Saturn

August 4th-5th, 2021. A warm, dry, windless, mostly clear night in Dewitt, NY. Saturn is at opposition with Jupiter not far behind. My driveway suffers with Bortle 9, and seeing was meh, but no dew, yay!

Once again, Sharpcap did it’s magic with deft and aplomb. I tested 4 different settings in an effort to increase the frames/second during movies of the gas giants. The best ones are below. The one of Jupiter was shot at nearly 80fps and wow, what a difference in clarity and color of the GRS and moons. This is also my first attempt at using RGB24 colour space. I think it’s better than RAW16, but the jury is still out.

Saturn
Saturn

Best of all, the Jupiter picture qualifies (IMHO) for EAA because it took less than 10 minutes from clicking “Start Capture” (4000 frames), to the thrice-processed, saved picture you see below. In other words, I think the public would probably wait 10 minutes to see a picture develop during a public event, don’t you? And with a thumbdrive, they could take these pictures home with them.

Jupiter processed from 4,000 frames
Jupiter processed from 4,000 frames