The Dutch Observatory

The seeing conditions finally turned in our favour and we had some great seeing and transparency.  I made a series of 9 images and am working on a 1 1/4 hour rotation animation which I will publish when I am satisfied with the result.  In the meantime here one of the images.  The image shows Io while it is starting its transit accross the planetary disk.

Two images of Mars from this morning.  Both Transparency and Seeing were great this morning.  Temperature was around 57 degrees and the humidity was 87%.  I captured these images with a gamma setting of 73 which I believe ends up in a better contrast.

The streak in better seeing continued for another day, so I took the opportunity to make another image from Mars.  Very humid this morning, but enough to capture this image without dewing over of the scope.  Philegra just visible on the left and Aetheria almost at the CM with Elysium in between, while Syrtis Major rises at the following limb.

Tonight was the night with the best seeing conditions of the year so far.  Transparency and seeing was well above normal altough it could have been better.  I made imags over a period of 45 minutes with the Williams Optics barlow.  these images have been used in the animation (middle thumbnail).  Two of them are shown as individual composites (bottom two thumbnails).  I than made two images using the Celestron 2x barlow, which gives a longer focal ratio.  I had to stop the exposure speed to 1/19 sec. and limit the number of frames to have sufficient light for a good histogram and to limit the rotation blur of the planet (top thumbnail)

Here the images from the evening of September 30th,  (October 1 UT) 

Here Jupiter with the GRS on September 29th.   Conditions were better than average with humidity and temperature being very pleasant. 

To use the change in weather, I had to do Mars this morning.  Jupiter did not work out last night but this morning the seeing was good, but the humidity really was high.  I barely made it for one image before I started noticing a drop in luminace in the capture program as my primary started to show signs of condensation.  The 12 Volt hair dryer did wonders!  Here the image from this morning.  Aetheria visible on the evening limb, Syrtus Major extending on the right to the equator on the right half of the image and Nodus Alcyonius noticeable in between.

Finally some good seeing conditions!!  I made 6 images over the span of 1/2 hour.  Than changed the barlow and used the Celestron Shorty plus with my 1 1/2″ extension tube and made two more images.  the increased size of the image required me to drop the exposure time from 1/77 sec to 1/19 sec and had to adjust the gain also.

The top thumbnail links to the animation showing Jupiter’s rotation for 1/2 hour and also shows the moon Ganymede orbitting behind Jupiter while it looks like it is appraoching the planet from the left.  Callisto is passing in front of the disk closing in on the preceding limb. (black dot)  Europa is moving accross the disk towards the CM in the Equitorial Zone.  Some of the images also had Io on the right of the planet, but I did crop that out, since not all images had this.

Following Tuesday evening we had some terrible storms.  However we did not get the worst.  Other areas of Atlanta were much worse of than we were.  In addition, my house is at a high elevation compared to many other areas, so we did not have any flooding at all.  Thursday night, the sky opened up again, but unlike the West side of the state, 60 miles East of Atlanta we had mediocre tranparency, but because I had “image fever” I did setup again and the result is not much better than the bad images of  Tuesday.  Here one of my images of Thurday evening.

We have had over two weeks of rain, clouds and other terrible weather. This as the first night where I could see some stars. The transparency was terrible but stability was OK, so I setup and probably made the worst image of this season. You can call it the “Image of Desperation”

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)