The Dutch Observatory

Last night 7/3o – 7/31 the conditions were not good again, but I was able to wait until Bird’s Stike was rising.  The image shows the spot as it grows and becomes a distinctive check mark.

After cloudy nights and days, the weather changed changed a little and the forecast was “relative” good (good seeing and below average transparency) for tonight for a few hours.  When I started imaging at midnight it was pretty bad and the first set was imaged through a thin layer of clouds. (You never know if it gets worse!)  But for once the weather cooperated and good seeing and transparency allowed me to image for 1 1/2 hours!   Here one of the images, however without the “Bird Strike” (Wesley’s impact spot)

Today, we would not be able in Atlanta to spot the “Bird Scar” so I imaged Jupiter as we saw it.  The seeing was pretty bad and the wind showed its results also.  So the images I made were not very good.  Since there was nothing new to report, I am posting only one.

The forecast for last night was no cloud cover, but bad transparency and bad seeing.  Thursday’s storms with 1/4″ rain had moved through so I had to give the impact zone another try.  When the spot was to transit, clouds were all over with a sporadic opening or thinner clouds.  I made three RGB sets with each of the components varying very heavy in brightness, to sometimes complete darkeness.  Here the set of three images under advers conditions.  But as I say: A bad shot is better than no shot at all

On July 19th Anthony Wesley, a very well known amateur astronomer from Australia discovered an impact scar in the South Polar Region of Jupiter.  He imaged the impact site and registered his findings.  About twelf hours later NASA was able to confirm his findings but was not able to determine the cause of the impact.  The next time for our location on earth to image the spot was early on the 21st.  Here four images I took while the clouds were marching accross Social Circle and had me busy to capture someting at all.

This is the first image I took after the impact of Jupiter.  The impact was arounf CM 210 so the impact site in this image is about 90 degrees out of site and therefore not visible.  Anyway, it does show that there are no other impacts sites in this area.

This morning gave me an opportunity to image Jupiter again.  Although the jetsteam had moved about 400 miles north of here and the clouds were gone, but the stability still was pretty bad and deteriorated as time went on.  Here Jupiter, while the GRS is moving towards the CM, Io is transitting the CM, and its shadow is on the way off the planet.  Note the activity in the belt just north of the GRS, and the activity in the NEB seems to expand quite a bit.

This is my first attempt to image an eclipse between two Gallilean moons.  This morning between 6:21 UT and 6:28 UT, the shadow from Io did transit  Ganymede.  This was an annular eclipse, but because of the difference in size of the two moons the drop in intensity of Ganymede was 0.35.  The animation makes up 18 frames between 6:16 UT and 6:34 UT with the transit being captured in frames 6-12 of the animation.  Because I wanted to have Jupiter in the image the moons are a little under exposed.  All images were processed the same:  250 out of 500 frames captured at 1/27 sec in IC Capture, stacked in Registax with mild wavelets applied (same setting for all).  No additional processing was performed in Photoshop.  Photoshop was only used to create the animation.  My next attempts of occultations or eclipses will require to increase the maginification for a better resolution.  Please click the image to start the animation.

The forecast was good for tonight, so here another image of Jupiter.  It was a  bit windy but the transparency was better than average and I was able to make 6 sets.  One of them here. I just wonder when I am getting the time to process all those sets which I have not done yet.  I guess it would be a lot simpler if I only would show the LRGB image and forget about the pertinent data.