Telescope Reviews: [MUST SEE] is this for real?

I see Ed that you are looking at this in terms of "height" now, you may be right? (I was looking at it in terms of length/width of plume.) Even if we only consider the height, I was also thinking along the lines of the cloud band color transitions on Saturn or Jupiter, one can have a linear feature that is smaller than the "resolving power" of a scope and still be detectable (the photons may not be "resolved", but they're still there.) 3.5" Questars regularly can see cloud band features on Jupiter as can be seen here in these Questar shots of Jupiter that seem IMO to be considerably smaller than the transiting moons or their shadows, and similarly there are perhaps cloud band features on Saturn that seem IMO to be somewhat smaller than the Cassini Division or its moons in these Saturn Questar images here(Cassini being seen all the way around BTW, and is that Enke hinted at and even a clearly resolved much smaller inner division on the Oct. 9th image ???)

I'm sure most would agree that there are things that we all see in this forum that seem to defy what could ever be accomplished (and I'm not talking about the website referred to at the beginning of this thread); I even sort of recall perhaps 10 or 12 years ago when I was just getting more interested in Amateur Astronomy sending a message to a website administrator (not CN) that I thought it was impossible that a certain user-submitted Jupiter image could be done by a scope of that aperture (I think it was a very small Maksutov but amazing image scale), but in retrospect I was surely wrong, that guy was just ahead of his time and had a great scope, and today that image would not have been near the quality of some of the things I've seen from similar apertures, and regarding scaling, well, there are things I've learned about scaling (that I don't use), and processing that would cause me not to doubt most others again.

Anyway, just to wind this down, I think it's possible (and that's just speculation on my part) to tell if a moon limb is out of round with a .5 arc second length feature, especially if there is an albedo or color change/difference between the limb and the plume. Just a speculation, but I think it's doable. BTW, the attached is a grid layout of 1 plume, which seems IMO to have a substantial length (not height) relative to planet diameter for me to speculate that if 2 plumes overlapped, perhaps it might be detectable? Perhaps it's worth a try with a nice large scope? (which unfortunately I don't have to test that speculation.) Freddy's outcome is similar to what I'd expect to see; if one could duplicate that feature over only several consecutive video runs, I think that would be enough to show that it's really there?

Jason H.

Edited by Jason H. (12/11/12 10:11 PM)