The Dutch Observatory

Jupiter is getting too low to image from my home, so have to start focussing on Saturn. The forecast for last night was great, but when I finished the setup at 4:30am this morning, a front of clouds was moving in. The temperature was freezing and my fingers felt like they froze off…. Around 5:45am I started shutting my laptop down, but than noticed an area opening up so got ready again.

This is my first Saturn of this apparition season. Not great, but I am happy with the result. Hopefully it will get better when I can spend more time on the imaging under a little higher temperatures .

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.

Transparency was decent but somehow the seeing was not as I was hoping for.  However, I could not resist imaging while the GRS was sliding off the planetary disk and at the same time Europa was getting ready to disappear behind Jupiter.

Here the image from the evening of October 19th 2008 from Charlie Elliott.

I was out of town in Upstate New York for about two weeks (Cold), and last week was rainy and cloudy.  So this was my first decent evening out again in about a month.  This is an RGB and IRGB image of the filtered images taken around 19:57 local time.  1500 images each color at 1/60 sec. with 1000 images stacked in Registax and post processed in Photoshop.

One of the four images in the next post was made just a few minuted past 8:00pm local time. Here the filtered and the IRGB image with the relevant information. For these runs I captured 1500 frames per channel and ended up stacking 1000 per channel.

Jupiter last night September 13, 2008.
We had planned an observing session at Charlie Elliott, but around 4:00pm we did scrub it because of the clouds. However, around 7:00pm it cleared up but the seeing was still below normal, so I set up at the “Dutch Observatory” with the intent to image for an hour. When it started to get dusk, Jupiter had moved dangerously close to my neighbour’s pine tree but I managed to get 5 sets in. (I need to talk to the guy accross my property if I can start setting up there . Here 4 of the 5 sets.