The Dutch Observatory

Saturday evening I tried to image Saturn, however, the transparency and stability were so bad that I am not going to post this image.  Instead, I imaged Jupiter on Monday morning.  The transparency and stability was not bad but got worse as time went on.  So here Jupiter with the GRS on June 22, 2009 while the conditions still were good.

This morning I was able to image again.  The Clear Sky Clock misled me again, instead of transparent, stable and good seeing conditions, high cloud bands kept moving in and out, leaving just sufficient time to complete one set, but with reduced IR frames.  This image shows Jupiter with Ganymede on the left and Callisto on the right. 

This morning expectations were great for observing from our location.  Both Ganymede and Io were to transit Jupiter, together with a GRS transit.  However the weather had other ideas.  Light haze at the surface and high cloud bands kept Jupiter moving in and out together with variable seeing.  I only got one complete run to process but with a limited number of frames.  The image shows Jupiter with the GRS just moving onto the planet on the left, Ganymede to the left of Jupiter,  Io just below the GRS and both moon’s shadows on the right.

This morning the GRS was transiting Jupiter.  We had the first clear morning in a few days, but the rain we had made it very humid.  The field accross my house was competely white from the fog.  The GRS looks pale, and the storms in the NEB and the NTropZ seem more organized in this image.

Jupiter on June 2nd.  Today we had a dubble transit with an added feature, the two moons Ganymede and Io were transitting the planet just before Io’s shadow left. I also made an animation with 4 images, with the shadow on two of them.  1 1/4 hours before this image, Ganymede did partially eclipse Io.

I put the 5 images from this morning in a little animation showing the moon Europa approaching Jupiter from the left, while its shadow creeps over the planetary surface on the right side of the disk. Two of the 5 images were pretty bad, so the best images are shown during the movement of Europa. Click on the blank image below to start the animation.

My first Jupiter session of the season.  This morning I did capture 5 filtered images.  This is probably the best of the 5.  It is fun to image Jupiter again and not have to worry about the number of photons coming in like when imaging Saturn at this time.  Jupiter is more than twice the size of Saturn with much light to spare.

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.