The Dutch Observatory

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.

Saturday evening when trying to image for the first time a deep sky object with my DMK, I ran out of power on my laptop.  Sunday evening I gave it another try.  Here an unguided image of NGC7662, a planetary nebula in Andromeda, also called the Blue Snowball.  The nebula is 2200 light years away and is 28×32 arc seconds in size and has a magnitude of 8.3.   Last year I did the same object with my Canon.  The image is a composite of LRGB images with each filter 25 frames of 23 seconds each for a total exposure time of approx. 45 minutes (The L component was made with a UV-IR block filter).  Because of the long exposure and not being guided the image does not show too much detail, but the double shell and the center star ar visible.

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.