The Dutch Observatory

Jon Wood told me that the blogs today (18th) talked about a Saturn moon six pack.  Sky and Telescope showed that 5 Saturnian moons would be lined up.  Calsky identified 7, but Hyperion showed pretty far from the planet.  In addition, someone must have done a pretty good sky dance, because stability and transparency were better than anytime I recall for this year.  Here my composite of Saturn and an image of the moons lined up.  Made from the Dutch Observatory. 

Tonight (2/23-2/24) was the night of the Saturnian quadruple moon transit. The only transit visible from our location was the beginning of Titan’s transit with the moon as well as its shadow being visible against the surface of Saturn an hour before sun rise. However, the planet would be behind the trees at my house at that time. So I imaged Saturn as Titan was moving towards Saturn before the event. 

It has been cloudy and windy lately.  Tonight the transparency was better but the wind made the scope vibrate every now and than.  This image made just after 11:00 p.m. local time.

Venus is getting ready for a nice conjunction with the Moon on December 31, while Jupiter and Mercury will have their own conjunction at that time. This image, two days before the event, shows nicely how all four of them are getting ready for this.  (From top to bottom: Venus, moon, Jupiter, Mercury)

Thursday evening September 5th, turned out to be half decent but difficult.  Right after sunset, the clouds started breaking up some more at Charlie Elliott observing field and allowed me to make a few images of Jupiter.  As the night went on the clouds got denser again and around 11:00pm we had a solid overcast.

Here two images made between some clouds. 

I did receive my scope back from Celestron last week and over the weekend I finished my new wedge, so here is a new image from Jupiter from Sunday night. The image was taken about 2:42 UT on July 21, 2008.  The image was taken with the CPC925 and the DMK21AU-04AS in direct focus at F/10.

I am pretty happy with the increase in detail which I am getting with the wedge!  Need to check the collimation and exposure times for captures with the barlow. 

Mars in 2007

Some images made in 2007 from Mars.  These images represent my learning curve with astro imaging and the Philips SPC900NC webcam.

This image is my first image of Mars and the SPC900NC.  It was made early in the morning around 9:36 UT from Social Circle.  For details about the capture and processing see the image.

During the end of October and November I was pretty busy with Comet 17P/Holmes.  In the beginning of December I put some effort back on Mars.  Here an image taken on December 9, 2007.

Mars on the evening of December 10, 2007.  The planet now is grown to a size of 15.7 arc seconds and almost 99% of the surface is visible.  Only a few weeks until apparation and opposition.

 Mars on December 12th.

This was Mars at apparation.  Unfortunately the seeing was not good, but at least I was able to get an image from this event.  The size of Mars has grown to 15.88 arc seconds and the phase is now at 100%.

Comet 17P/Holmes

I guess I will start with some images which I made from Comet 17P/Holmes.  I spend considerable time imaging Holmes over a two month period.  First the comet itself, than when the coma extended my field of view, the comet in the evening sky against the constellations and other sky objects.

My first image of Comet 17P Holmes imaged the evening of October 25, 2008 from the Dutch Observatory

Image showing the increase of the size of the comet over a 7 day period

Holmes on the evening of 10/28 with identifying starfield. 
Thanks Clevis for your help with this!

This was Comet 17P/Holmes the evening of 10/31/2007 at 9:06 EST.  We had trouble identifying the location of Holmes because we could not find the double star to the right of Holmes in the catalogues.  Eventually with the help of Bill Gray from Project Pluto, the double was identifed as ES 465 (T.E. Espin’s list of double stars)  Most other catalogues listed the double as a single unresolved star.  Interesting to note that the two stars of the double were observed and measured 7 times between 1907 and 1971 and that in that period the stars moved 1.7 arc seconds away from each other.

The final image from Holms here, is an image taken on its 115th  discovery aniversary date,
November 6, 2007 2:20 UT

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