This page describes how the rotating Jupiter movie was made.

To create the spinning Jupiter globe, first I took four pictures of the different sides of Jupiter, spaced roughly 90° apart, as shown below. Jupiter rotates every 10 hours, so it took only two nights to get the four images. (More pictures would have have been better, but the weather has been so cloudy in New Jersey this year, that it was hard to find two successive clear nights.)

Shown above are the four images used to create the movie. Each image is a composite of about 1000 video frames selected from 1,650 taken using a Philips ToUcam Pro through an Astro-Physics 155mm (6.1 inch) refractor at about f50. Exposure was 1/50th second at fifteen frames/second. Seeing was average. The video was captured using K3CCDTools, combined using Registax, and further processed in Photoshop.

Once I had images of four sides of Jupiter, I used Iris software to create a composite cylindrical projection map. The central region (120° of latitude) of the cylindrical map is shown above. Once the map was completed, the individual frames of the movies were created in Iris by re-projecting the map back onto a sphere at different central meridian positions. The frames were further optimized in Photoshop and assembled in ImageReady. The resulting movie consists of 240 frames, each differing by 1.5° in central meridian, running at 20 frames/second. These 240 frames, which take 12 seconds to loop, are the result of more than 6,000 raw video frames taken over two nights.

The movie is displayed on this site in several versions:

• A version consisting of 240 frames at twenty frames/second.
• An anaglyphic (red/blue glasses) 3D view.
• A stereo (left/right images) 3D view.

(Please note that all images shown here are copyrighted ©2003-2004 and must not be copied on your web site without my written permission!) Here's how to contact me.