The Dutch Observatory

The moon is moving up closer to Venus and Jupiter and Mercury moved close to each other as they get ready for a great conjunction of December 31.  This image was made at Charlie Elliott the evening of 12/30/2008.  The sky showed large streaks of thin clouds, which moved in front of the Moon and Jupiter and Mercury.  In this image they all seemed to come through, but Jupiter and Mercury are very low in the sky.  From top to bottom: Venus, Moon, Jupiter and Mercury.

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter came in a beautiful conjunction in the evening of December 1, 2008.  Since the forecast was cloudy skies for Social Circle, I went out the night before and captured some images from the trio the night before, just in case.  However, after a cloudy sky all day long, the skies over Walton county cleared up between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon and gave way to a beautiful sight.  Here, two images of the nigt of the conjunction (Venus and Jupiter are 2 degrees apart), and one from the night before.

I’ve put some of the images taken of Jupiter from April until the middle of November and created this composite showing Jupiter as it appeared in 2008.  When put in context with each other it becomes very visible when the images are not processed the same.  This year was focussed on making improvements in capturing and the way I process images and get a basic understanding of the overall color balance.  So next year I will need to focus more on getting a unifirm color balance in all images.  We’ll see how I do on that! 

Jupiter is moving rapidly westward towards Venus, and with this, every day it sits lower in the early evening sky.  Here another Jupiter image under medium to low conditions made on Monday evening November 10, 2008 from Charlie Elliott observing field. 

Jon decided to go to Charlie Elliott for some guided imaging last night and I decided to join him for a while.  I ran into some issues and had problems aligning my scope, but before that, I was able to run some Jupiter images since Jupiter is blocked by some trees from home.  Jupiter is getting smaller every night and very low in the sky from our location.  Here the two images I took.

I thought the previous image was the best from last night. Guess I was wrong. Here an image from a few minutes earlier with also the moons Io and Europa.

It seemed a nice evening but because of the limited oportunity time (between two trees) and several airplanes leaving Atlanta causing disturbance, the conditions were not great.  In addition, the planet is now very low in the sky.  Despite that, I gave Jupiter another try.  Here the best image of three taken around 8:00pm eastern, from Social Circle on October 30, 2008.

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. 

GRS transit on July 2. 2008.  Jon Wood and I made this image from Charlie Elliott using his scope, a 10″ LX200R on a EQ6 mount and my DMK24AU4.  We run 2000 frames each color at 30fps and 1/30 seconds each.