The Dutch Observatory

I got up early to give Mars anoter try.  Transparency was pretty bad and the Mars images were very bad.  Than when I was ready to pack it up I saw Venus shining through a large opening in the trees.  Since I have not tried Venus, I decided to give this a try.  Venus at 13 degrees was a lot lower in the sky than Mars and the transparency and seeing were a lot worse, but there was a lot more light work with.  So here my first image of Venus under pretty bad conditions.

Another night with great comparative “great”  seeing.  (Can’t wait for it to really get good )  Anyway, this was also the first night with my new WO barlow.  I figured that this barlow gets me an f/15 instead of the f/13 with the other.  I also did some experimentation with capturing at different gamma levels as well as a little difference im my processing.  Here four images from tonight’s session.  These images show the GRS on the preceeding side of the planetary disk, while the remnants of the Impact scar start coming up on the rising F-limb.

Another night of good seeing in the forecast.  This time I captured I captured three images while the GRS is rising on the following limb.

Well, finally the streak of bad weather, cloud covers and rain stopped and we had a day of better than everage conditions, so I took the opportunity to image Jupiter again.  Here two images of four which I took showing Jupiter with Io half way between the rising limb and its shadow just on the planets surface, while the Bird’s Strike is ready to leave the disk on the preceding limb.

I had planned on imaging Jupiter last night, but as I woke up at 1:00am, Jupiter was already behind the trees in front of my house, so I decided to give Mars a try at 5:00 am. 

Yes, this is my first image of Mars for the 2009/2010 apparation, and not the hair dryer which was in front of the corrector plate a lot longer than Mars was.  The dewing was very bad, however I had just enough time to get a complete set of AVIs to create this one image.

Syrtis Major can be seen at the following limb as well as Hellas and the northern polar cap is very visible, especially in the blue image.

Last night the “Bird’s Strike” remnants were visible for me during the 3 hour window when I can see Jupiter from my home.  Here one of the images.  The dark spot really has expanded and I believe I can see the three seperate blobs.  (See larger inset)

I finished processing my RGB images of Jupiter with Calista, its shadow while Ganymede was tracking behind the planet.  Here two images.  The first one from before the shadow left the limb and the second after the shadow disappeared, but before Ganymede disappeared in Jupiters shadow.  (See animation on the previous post)

Conditions were a lot better than we have had in a long time. Seeing was probably up to 6 and transparency up to 8. I made a total of 48 channel images between 3.46 and 4.46 UT of which a series of 6 was Red only.

I did image Jupiter and two of its moons. I made an animation using the red channels only of Calista passing over the disk while its shadow left the disk, while Ganymede was passing behind Jupiter and disappeared in Jupiter’s shadow.  I will be trying to use the RGB images to make a color version, but Ganymede moves pretty fast accross and I have problems lining up its color channels.

ALPO members have been making images of the the impact spot (Bird’s Strike) since Anthony announced its discovery.   Hans Joerg Mettig from Jupos.org in Freiburg Germany did convert a nice number of them to polar views.
I decided to put these in an animation so one could see how the spot evolved between 7/19 and 8/7. Here the result of the animation with images from Anthony Wesley, Damien Peach, Joel Warren, Paulo Casquinha, Fabio Carvalho with Hans Joerg Mettig providing the conversion to polar view.

It is interesting to see how early on a spot broke off and moved north while than it got pushed back into the main stream of the belt.

Another set of the session of last night.  This image shows the last image of the set of three together with the RGB filtered images and shows the Bird’s Strike best.  (Click image for larger view)