Jupiter in JPEG
Over the weekend, me and a couple of hyper active juniors tried taking pictures of various celestial objects, over the course of a couple of hours. We tried Jupiter, Pleiades, Orion and the comet Lovejoy. It was fulfilling to have atleast gotten some pictures of jupiter, although they were (slightly) out-of-focus. We used a DSLR and we didn't use the ability of our mount to track the object for a longer exposure, something that we definitely need to try the next time!
I just got my hands on the data in the evening and I wanted to try something different, different than the usual image processing done on Jupiter and the like. I wanted to see if i can get any useful information out of the picture, like the ratio of distances between the moons of jupiter or the ratio of radius of jupiter to distances of various moons. But for that I need to identify the moons and their *centers*. Here are the results of my initial attempt at modeling the out-of-focus moons and I just realized that all 3 of the moons visible should be out-of-focus too, in the same fashion! Next step, model them too and see how different the models of the three moons are. Making a 3D model of Jupiter itself, to estimate it's center and width, doesn't seem to be possible because of over exposure. If you notice, we don't see the peak of the planet, in intensity, and it doesn't make sense to model a nearly vertical gradient in intensity using a Gaussian. Note that I shouldn't actually be modeling them as gaussians rather as airy disks but hey, i guess the spherical cow joke should be updated to include a gaussian too!
I just got my hands on the data in the evening and I wanted to try something different, different than the usual image processing done on Jupiter and the like. I wanted to see if i can get any useful information out of the picture, like the ratio of distances between the moons of jupiter or the ratio of radius of jupiter to distances of various moons. But for that I need to identify the moons and their *centers*. Here are the results of my initial attempt at modeling the out-of-focus moons and I just realized that all 3 of the moons visible should be out-of-focus too, in the same fashion! Next step, model them too and see how different the models of the three moons are. Making a 3D model of Jupiter itself, to estimate it's center and width, doesn't seem to be possible because of over exposure. If you notice, we don't see the peak of the planet, in intensity, and it doesn't make sense to model a nearly vertical gradient in intensity using a Gaussian. Note that I shouldn't actually be modeling them as gaussians rather as airy disks but hey, i guess the spherical cow joke should be updated to include a gaussian too!
