All these pictures of were taken using the Meade 2x Barlow with a 10 inch Meade LX200 GPS telescope and a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000.

25 April 2007 ImageJ Interactive 3D Surface Plot Plotted brightness levels: 0 to 200	25 April 2007 Stacked and Sharpened using Iris Number of frames: 5 15 25 50 100 200	25 April 2007 ImageJ Interactive 3D Surface Plot Plotted brightness levels: 40 to 200

Here is the 70 KB unprocessed AVI. 300 frames at 5 fps. Unfortunately I used DIVX as codec - so if you do not have it you will not be able to read this AVI. In future I will use more standard codecs.

This is my first effort at capturing surface detail on Ganymede.

In future the 3D plots will not have a red background - it looks to cheap and childish against by cream colored website background.

Based on this first attempt I am confident that I will be able to eventually resolve surface detail on Ganymede.

Reasons for confidence:

• - It has been 3 years since I did any astronomy 'work'
• - I captured these images on only the second night after my arrival at Sutherland.
• - These AVIs were captured in Alt/Az mode
• - These AVIs were captured for only 1 minute - Ganymede rotates in 7 days - MUCH !!! longer captures are possible
• - Telescope not yet properly collimated
• - I captured these AVIs with me sitting directly below the path from the telescope to Jupiter - how silly - this will not happen in future (I could see how the image quality degrade minutes after I sat down). I sat on the 'stoep' - it was 3 degrees Celsius (around 40 F) and I was not willing to freeze sitting directly under the open skies.
• - I only spend minutes to figure out the most useful Unsharp masking settings for these images of Ganymede - I still have to experiment with deconvolution and wavelet processing.
• - I still have to experiment with the correct exposure time and gain settings.
• - Focus could have been better - I photographed some stars later the night and realized how the focus of Ganymede could be SIGNIFICANTLY improved
• - Seeing was 6 out of 10 using the Pickering scale.
• - Since I was too excited to get started I only did a hasty job in 2-star aligning the telescope. I spend a great deal of effort having to manually guide to keep Ganymede on the CCD chip.So the telescope was continually moving in order to keep Ganymede on the CCD chip.
• - I calibrated the Meade drives using the Finder scope - WOW - this made my manual guiding efforts painfully inaccurate. Lesson learnt: I will use a high powered eyepiece to do this calibration before I capture more AVIs.
• - images captured using 2x Barlow ... a 3x Barlow might be better.

Here is the unprocessed 175 KB AVI of the star I photographed in Saggitarius: 600 frames.

The second Jupiter image I took in 2007: 25 April 1h11 - local time

75 of 300 images stacked using Iris ( captured 5 fps for 60 seconds )

Apparent diameter: 43.2 "

Captured in Alt/Az mode using 2x Meade Barlow.

Here is the unprocessed 2.4 MB AVI of Jupiter.

This can also be significantly improved based on the reasons given above.