I took an image of Jupiter with the BIGGEST telescope I've ever used!!

(full video showing setup and imaging here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBmIUowI1Z0) Hey folks! I'm an astrophysicist and I work at an observatory with lots of really crazy large telescopes. But we always use these for really specific science targets, like supernovae, and they're robotically controlled, so not so hands-on. However, through them, I recently got access to one of their more consumer-grade telescopes--a HUGE Celestron CPC1100! This thing is a dual-fork-arm GOTO telescope with a crazy 11 inch aperture--way bigger than my personal 6 inch telescope and bigger than any telescope I've ever used for personal observing! The weather wasn't amazing but I took it out for a test drive on Jupiter!

The final image. Even though it got cloudy and the seeing wasn't amazing, the detail we were able to capture is kind of nuts! You can clearly see different cloud bands and zones, and different temperature/composition regions. The brown caps on the top and bottom of Jupiter are clearly visible, as well as several dark storm cells. I can't wait for another night with better seeing! To watch the whole process from start to finish check out my video on this night of observing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBmIUowI1Z0

This telescope is MASSIVE and hadn't been used in a while, so I calibrated and collimated the equipment earlier in the day. This shot is just with my phone, but I couldn't believe how much detail I was able to see on the top of a tall faraway tree! The optics on this thing are OUTSTANDING!

My puppy Pickles kept me company! The observatory I work at is dog friendly, so he and his friends are always running around and playing. But it was getting pretty late so this little guy was pooped! He loves coming on observing nights though :) lots of fun stuff to explore and new things to sniff!

I set up outside one of our telescope domes, holding this massive thing! This is one of our 1-meter robotic telescopes. While it would have been fun to use this gigantic thing, I actually just needed the power strip inside the dome to power the CPC1100 haha. Another time for sure though!

Jupiter was out and rising above the dome! Time to get down to business.

I set up the CPC1100 and used SkyAlign to align it to the stars! Then all I had to do was punch in Jupiter and it would slew itself automatically over, and track it perfectly for the rest of the night! The camera I'm using is a special dedicated planetary astrophotography camera, my personal ZWO ASI224MC that I use for my other astrophotography. It can take images at up to 500fps and its specially designed for lucky imaging of planets!

The live view from the camera! You can see Jupiter and one of its moons very clearly! This is not zoomed in by the way--the telescope is so big Jupiter really looks huge on my camera!

Unfortunately, it got unexpectedly cloudy, but we started collecting data at around 200fps! Even in the live view, you can see Jupiter's bands perfectly!

Here's the live view from the telescope, then the raw stack using a program called AstroSurface, and then finally the post-processed version! Every good image you've seen of the planets goes through these steps: acquisition, stack, process.