Amateur Photograph of Jupiter
It looks as though you don’t need a Hubble telescope to take some great pictures of Jupiter. All you need are some modest pieces of equipment and a whole lot of patience.
Check out these photos that were taken by Mike Salway, an amateur astronomer living in Australia. The pictures were produced using an unguided 10 inch Dobsonian telescope and a ToUCam web camera. The pictures which were taken on March 12th 2006 have the same clarity of pictures that were taken by the Voyager, except that Mike didn’t have to travel over 90% of the distance between Earth and Jupiter to get them.
He achieve these photo’s by taking 450 separate exposures at five frames per second in a space of ninety second. He then picked the best and clearest images for each set, digitally combined and enhanced them to make a final picture.
Mike was also able to make a short sixteen-frame movie which actually shows the Jupiter’s rotation span over an hour and a half.
The really cool thing is if you take a look at picture three you will see some arrows which they think is the new storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere. This new storm has the same characteristics of the Great Red Spot (Red Jr) which is a storm so huge it could swallow several Earths and has been raging for over three hundred years.
The top picture was taken by Mike Salway and the bottom was taken by the Voyager.
It looks as though you don’t need a Hubble telescope to take some great pictures of Jupiter. All you need are some modest pieces of equipment and a whole lot of patience.
Check out these photos that were taken by Mike Salway, an amateur astronomer living in Australia. The pictures were produced using an unguided 10 inch Dobsonian telescope and a ToUCam web camera. The pictures which were taken on March 12th 2006 have the same clarity of pictures that were taken by the Voyager, except that Mike didn’t have to travel over 90% of the distance between Earth and Jupiter to get them.
He achieve these photo’s by taking 450 separate exposures at five frames per second in a space of ninety second. He then picked the best and clearest images for each set, digitally combined and enhanced them to make a final picture.
Mike was also able to make a short sixteen-frame movie which actually shows the Jupiter’s rotation span over an hour and a half.
The really cool thing is if you take a look at picture three you will see some arrows which they think is the new storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere. This new storm has the same characteristics of the Great Red Spot (Red Jr) which is a storm so huge it could swallow several Earths and has been raging for over three hundred years.
The top picture was taken by Mike Salway and the bottom was taken by the Voyager.