New ZWO ASI120MC-S Camera

Jupiter In Color

On the evening of April 16th, after a full morning and afternoon of solar imaging, the sky remained completely clear. I returned to my telescope in twilight as the temperature dropped rapidly. Moonlight was bright, but Jupiter was high in the sky and well positioned for imaging. I was anxious to try a new ZWO ASI120MC-S USB 3.0 color camera on Jupiter.

I began capturing Jupiter with a 5X Barlow lens on my 130mm Stellarvue refractor. Seeing was not bad, so I expected better results than I got in the first image below. This image was made by stacking the best 100 frames from a 3,000-frame video. Jupiter's moon, Io, is in the lower right. The image is disappointing because it doesn't show fine detail like swirls in the Jovian cloud bands. Maybe I haven't yet mastered the processing skills to reveal small details. Or, maybe the inherent resolution of my telescope-camera combination isn't sufficient to capture the missing detail. I'll investigate these possibilities in the future.

Next, I tried less magnification. Jupiter is smaller in the next image made with a 3X Barlow lens. In this wider field of view the Jovian moon, Europa, is now visible to the upper left. Fine detail seems better in this image produced by stacking the best 100 frames of a 2,000-frame video.

My final capture of Jupiter was made with a 2X Barlow lens. Now the field of view widens even more to include a third moon, Ganymede, in the far upper left. (The fourth Galilean moon, Callisto, was far out of the field of view to the lower right.)

The image made with the 3X Barlow seems the most pleasing. Maybe it's the closest fit to the imaging system's inherent resolving power. I've ordered a 4X Barlow to see if it better hits the imaging sweet spot.

After completing trial and error experiments with Jupiter, I installed the 5X Barlow with my monochrome ZWO ASI174MM camera and constructed a 30-panel mosaic of the waxing gibbous Moon three days past first quarter. The area near the terminator showed lots of good detail as you can see in the following half-sized image. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Just a bit of color has been added to the previous image to enhance the view. I'm looking forward to more planetary imaging with the new color camera.