Jupiter reached its closest point to Earth for this year on July 15th when it was a mere 385 million miles away. By August 4th, when this image was taken, it had moved out a bit to about 390 million miles but still very bright. I finally managed to capture an image of the planet with the Giant Red Spot front and center along with Jupiter's smallest and closest Galilean moon, Io.

Meade LX850 Catadioptric telescope/GEM, 2x Powermate Image Amplifier, ASI224MC color video camera, laptop computer.

This image is derived from a video sequence of 8,016 frames taken over 153 seconds. These frames were cropped in Pipp so as to include the moon Io, debayered in Pipp, aligned in Registax6 and 3100 frames were stacked and wavelet processed in Registax6 to produce this single color .jpg image. Further minor adjustments to lighting and contrast in Lightroom and the moon Io was brightened slightly in Photoshop Elements.