The Dutch Observatory

I received an email with some pictures from my niece and her friend in the Netherlands of the close conjunction of Mars, Venus and Saturn (left to right). Gineke and Martin took these pictures when they were on their vacation in Switzerland. Its a very nice composition of the three just before they sink behind the mountains. Martin is also an astronomy amateur and is a member of a “Sterrenwacht” in the Netherlands. The star at 45 degrees to the left and above Mars is Porrima in Virgo.   Thanks for sharing Gineke and Martin!!

It has been 2 weeks since I had time to do some imaging again.  Here an image of Saturn from last night May 23.  Conditions were variable and I made three runs with various barlows.  Here the image with the WO 2x barlow screwed on the nose piece of the camera which makes it approx. a F 13.  I did not push the image very hard so it is a little soft.

Have been busy with outreach and other stuff so did finally make time to process an image of Saturn from the evening of May 9th.  Don’t seem to get the processing right yet this year. 

This is kind of the “First Image” on the new pier.  Made the image in two versions Tuesday evening. The first one an RGB, the second an IRGB with the IR as luminance.  It was pretty humid and was only able to get this one image from Saturn before the dew started palying a role. 

Finally the bad weather gave us a short break and for two days we had relative nice weather to image.  One day I used to try to capture the ISS again, which this time I did not manage to get. (Was looking in the wrong spot )  The second was tonight and wanted to get another Saturn.  Saturn is getting high in the sky now and soon will be obstructed by the trees on the west side of my property.  So here another Saturn with Enceladus below the planetary disk, captured  under OK conditions, with disturbance coming occasionally from the vortices of the planes coming over and drifting in the field of view.

For a change the bad weather is leaving us alone and we are having some great conditions for imaging.  The images of this week are probably the best of this year for me.  I hope the streak of seeing continues. Saturday evening I tried my old Celestron Barlow Shorty Plus, which gives me an F/20.  the light reaching the chip is a lot less and need to reduce the exposure time to 1/15sec. and the frame rate running the 640×480 image went down to 10 fps.

The bad weather streak ended and the forecast was good.  However, clouds moved in in the afternoon to give way at least for a couple of hours in the early evening.  We took the opportunity to go to CE and image Saturn.  The first set was OK, with the red channel being the best.  The rest was not worth processing.  Here the image with the moons Rhea, Enceladus, and Tethys.  The moons Dione and Mimas are in front of the planetary disk, but I cannot make them out.

Today, March 8th., is Saturn’s opposition, so Earth is right between the Sun and Saturn.  This is when the reflection of the sun’s rays on the rings is strongest and brightest.  This phenomenon is called the Seeliger effect.  Here two images of Saturn’s opposition taken 8 minutes apart around 4:00 UT.

Saturn’s opposition is only two days away.  You never know how the weather changes. So as the sky conditions were not bad, I had to get my image in, just in case….  Here Saturn at 2:53 UT on March 6th.  Note the light spot at CM329 in the STeZ.

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.