Following on from yesterday’s blog, Mike Salway again has submitted some more of his work.

In his e-mail to The Imaging Source, Mike writes:

Callisto, moving towards Jupiter, is casting the shadow on Jupiter in the first few frames. Europa and Io are in a close pairing, moving away from Jupiter.

I was lucky enough that Callisto was just close enough to Jupiter so that I could capture a reference frame to pinpoint the Moon’s position relative to Jupiter. I could then capture a separate set of AVI’s with the 3 moons in the same Field of View. This was repeated 5 times throughout the session to get the data for the animation.

Jupiter’s 8-frame animation was tricky to align in terms of limbs and colour balance, because the first 4 frames were captured in poorer seeing at 30fps with a decreasing histogram due to the mirrors fogging up. The last 4 frames were captured at 15fps with a much fuller histogram in improved seeing.

Captured with a 12″ newt and DMK 21AU04. Processed in Registax v5 (beta), Astra Image, Photoshop and Jasc Animation Shop.

Click on the following image for the original animation:

Again, keep up the good work, Mike!