The Dutch Observatory

The beginning of September was quite exciting for me.  The final version of the Jupiter Scar animation was made and contained data from July 19 until September 9th and contained images from the following individuals:  Anthony Wesley, Damian Peach, Donald Parker Joel Warren, Paulo Casquinha, Stephen Keene, Mike Salway, Michael Phillips, Trevor Barry, Christopher Go, Tomio Akutsu, Stefan Buda, Brian Combs, Fabio Carvalho, and Zac Pujic, while Hans Joerg Mettig provided the polar projection conversions.  Thanks again guys!!  Different versions of the animation made it on SpaceWeather.com (August 7, 2009), Sky and Telescope, and even on NASA’s APOD (September 8, 2009 Picture of the day).

Since NASA misstated their activities around the confirmation of the scar in the APOD, I decided to make a small movie of the events around the scar and included the animation to give a true timeline.  Here the short movie (3 1/2 minutes and 20 MB)

The weather was not too bad so I made some more images for my collection of Jupiter of this apparation on the day of opposition  August 14th.  (The Sun, Earth and Jupiter are lined up in one line).  In addition I ran some tests using different gama values for the DMK.  The gama value used is stated on the image.  For the larger image, which was made using a Celestron Shorty Plus barlow instead of the WO, the gama setting was 70.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Mutual Events page of the USNO website and marked this event on my calendar.  At 1.10am EDT, Jupiter’s moon Io started eclipsing the moon Europa and 13 minutes after the completion of this event the same moons occulted.  Since Io was moving in its orbit from the back of the planet to the front towards us, it looked like Io did not move, so the animation shows this correctly.

I captured the 0.5 hour of the events in this animation consisting of 20 frames. The event was captured with my mono DMK using a red filter. Each frame was created  by stacking 250 frames out of 500, using Registax, followed by a little sharpening.   You first see the eclipse followed by the occultation compressed in 10 second animation.

On July 19th Anthony Wesley, a very well known amateur astronomer from Australia discovered an impact scar in the South Polar Region of Jupiter.  He imaged the impact site and registered his findings.  About twelf hours later NASA was able to confirm his findings but was not able to determine the cause of the impact.  The next time for our location on earth to image the spot was early on the 21st.  Here four images I took while the clouds were marching accross Social Circle and had me busy to capture someting at all.

This morning gave me an opportunity to image Jupiter again.  Although the jetsteam had moved about 400 miles north of here and the clouds were gone, but the stability still was pretty bad and deteriorated as time went on.  Here Jupiter, while the GRS is moving towards the CM, Io is transitting the CM, and its shadow is on the way off the planet.  Note the activity in the belt just north of the GRS, and the activity in the NEB seems to expand quite a bit.

The forecast was good for tonight, so here another image of Jupiter.  It was a  bit windy but the transparency was better than average and I was able to make 6 sets.  One of them here. I just wonder when I am getting the time to process all those sets which I have not done yet.  I guess it would be a lot simpler if I only would show the LRGB image and forget about the pertinent data.

On May 8th 2009 Anthony Wesley in Australia captured the Gallilean Moon Europa eclipse the moon Ganymede.  To my knowledge this was the first time an amateur captured the complete occultation of two Gallilean moons in an animation.  My attempts to do the same since than have been hindered by weather conditions on the dates that such event was visible from my location, until this morning.  Here my capture of Ganymede (front and larger) partially occulting Europa, while Io is visible at the right starting to make its turn at the end of its orbit.  Not as good as Anthony’s, but I am happy with the result and waiting for another opportunity.  The sequence consists of 14 images between 6:49 UT and 7:21 UT.  Each image contains approx. 250 out of 500 frames 1/11 sec each stacked in Registax 5 and post processed in Photoshop. Seeing was variable during the capture series and probably peeked at average.  Click the image to activate the animation.

Sunday evening the good seeing continued.  so here an image of Sunday’s session.  Nothing special to see on the planet.

Saturday was again a good seeing day and made a few sets from my home.  Here one of the images

Since the last image in this blog, we have had some bad weather in the south.  Our “annual” snow storm produced 6″ of snow at the Dutch Observatory.  But in the last week the weather started clearing with a few clear skies in between the storms.  Last Saturday was relatively good, but last night the transparency was great but some occasional wind gusts made the tranparency less desirable.  Here an image from last night of Saturn with the moons Dione at left above the rings and Tethys, just below the rings a little left of the CM.