Introduction

WinJUPOS is the result of long-time work of amateur astronomers to support observation and analysis of phenomena on planets of our solar system. The core of the software is a database of positions of objects in the atmosphere, or on the surface, of the planets and the Sun.

It began with an electronic data collection, as part of the International Jupiter Voyager Telescope Observations Programme (
IJVTOP), made by Holger Haug and Christian Kowalec on VAX machines in the 70's.

In 1989, Hans-Jörg Mettig developed the Central Meridian Transits Project (
ZMPP, version 1) for Jupiter, which made possible a first data management and analysis on PC's under the operation system DOS.

In 1992 the author, Grischa Hahn, resumed development of this program, and later produced the DOS softwares PC-MAPOS (Mars), PC-JUPOS (Jupiter, versions 2 to 6) and PC-SAPOS (Saturn), as well as numerous utilities.

Due to the rapid technical progress, software porting to WINDOWS became more and more urgent, and finally started in 2002. WinJUPOS (to version 7) comprises all previous developments.


What can you do with JUPOS ?


It helps the observer in the preparation of an observation. For that purpose, you can use the modules Ephemerides and Planning of observations.

The visual observer of Jupiter and Saturn can record his Central Meridian transits of an objects with the module
Recording of Central Meridian transit timings in the database.

Observations made with the help of digital images (CCD images or digitalized photos) require a more complex processing.

For instance, if you have monochromatic images of different wawelengths and if you want to produce from them a color image, use the module
Image computation. But first, you must measure the monochromatic images in the module Image measurement, (that is to place carefully the outline frame and to save the parameters in a file).

With the module
Image measurement, you can produce object positions and record them in the database.

From one or several measured digital images, you can produce a map with the module
Map computation. Then, these maps can be used in the module Ephemerides for texturing the surface of a celestial body.

The recorded object positions can be be filtered with several criteria (module
Selection).

The module
Longitudinal shifts allows to compute personal systematic errors of an observer in C.M. transits. Then, these corrections can be used in the module Selection.

The average positions of an object can be computed in the module
Positional averages.

Object positions can be displayed in a graph with the module
Drift charts.

An average linear drift of an object for a determined time span can be computed. For that purpose, there are several possibilities: in a list of object positions on a graph, by using two points or building a polygon around the points. These drifts can be used in several modules, using the WinJUPOS clipboard: as modified rotational system, to draw drift lines in
Drift charts or as a record in a particular drift file.

Another automatic way of computing and displaying longitudinal drifts (on Jupiter and Saturn) is possible with the modules
Longitude drifts determination from image pairs, Computation of drift averages and Longitudinal drift charts.


(c) Grischa Hahn, Michel Jacquesson