The Dutch Observatory

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.

Jupiter was an interesting object last night.  Io did transit the planet while the shadows from Io and Callisto were visible on the planetary disk.  We were supposed to have bad weather, but most of the clouds moved out at a few minutes before 8:00 EDT, but some residual thin clouds stayed around and made the seeing terrible. 

I wanted to give it a try and see if I could get anything.  Here three images made in terrible seeing, but the shadows are visible.  However, there is not sufficient detail to make out Io against the background of Jupiter.

Thursday evening September 5th, turned out to be half decent but difficult.  Right after sunset, the clouds started breaking up some more at Charlie Elliott observing field and allowed me to make a few images of Jupiter.  As the night went on the clouds got denser again and around 11:00pm we had a solid overcast.

Here two images made between some clouds. 

Wednesday the clouds from Gustav started clearing and the sky was clear and stable as it had not been in a while.  This was an opportunity to test my new barlow lens.  A 2x Williams Optics.  Used in the binos.  It screws right in the filter thread of the DMK.  Used with the CPC925 and the DMK21AU04.AS in this way it gives an effective focal ratio of F13.  I ran 7 sets that night, one of them with the Celestron 2x Shorty Plus cell used in a similar way.  The latter one gave a 2x maginifcation, but the focus for this barlow seems to be very critical.  Just as the test images from last month show.

Here the two best sets from this night.