The Dutch Observatory

Sunday evening the good seeing continued.  so here an image of Sunday’s session.  Nothing special to see on the planet.

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.

Saturday was again a good seeing day and made a few sets from my home.  Here one of the images

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.

Since the last image in this blog, we have had some bad weather in the south.  Our “annual” snow storm produced 6″ of snow at the Dutch Observatory.  But in the last week the weather started clearing with a few clear skies in between the storms.  Last Saturday was relatively good, but last night the transparency was great but some occasional wind gusts made the tranparency less desirable.  Here an image from last night of Saturn with the moons Dione at left above the rings and Tethys, just below the rings a little left of the CM.