The Dutch Observatory

I had planned on imaging Jupiter last night, but as I woke up at 1:00am, Jupiter was already behind the trees in front of my house, so I decided to give Mars a try at 5:00 am. 

Yes, this is my first image of Mars for the 2009/2010 apparation, and not the hair dryer which was in front of the corrector plate a lot longer than Mars was.  The dewing was very bad, however I had just enough time to get a complete set of AVIs to create this one image.

Syrtis Major can be seen at the following limb as well as Hellas and the northern polar cap is very visible, especially in the blue image.

The weather was not too bad so I made some more images for my collection of Jupiter of this apparation on the day of opposition  August 14th.  (The Sun, Earth and Jupiter are lined up in one line).  In addition I ran some tests using different gama values for the DMK.  The gama value used is stated on the image.  For the larger image, which was made using a Celestron Shorty Plus barlow instead of the WO, the gama setting was 70.

Last night the “Bird’s Strike” remnants were visible for me during the 3 hour window when I can see Jupiter from my home.  Here one of the images.  The dark spot really has expanded and I believe I can see the three seperate blobs.  (See larger inset)

I finished processing my RGB images of Jupiter with Calista, its shadow while Ganymede was tracking behind the planet.  Here two images.  The first one from before the shadow left the limb and the second after the shadow disappeared, but before Ganymede disappeared in Jupiters shadow.  (See animation on the previous post)

Conditions were a lot better than we have had in a long time. Seeing was probably up to 6 and transparency up to 8. I made a total of 48 channel images between 3.46 and 4.46 UT of which a series of 6 was Red only.

I did image Jupiter and two of its moons. I made an animation using the red channels only of Calista passing over the disk while its shadow left the disk, while Ganymede was passing behind Jupiter and disappeared in Jupiter’s shadow.  I will be trying to use the RGB images to make a color version, but Ganymede moves pretty fast accross and I have problems lining up its color channels.

ALPO members have been making images of the the impact spot (Bird’s Strike) since Anthony announced its discovery.   Hans Joerg Mettig from Jupos.org in Freiburg Germany did convert a nice number of them to polar views.
I decided to put these in an animation so one could see how the spot evolved between 7/19 and 8/7. Here the result of the animation with images from Anthony Wesley, Damien Peach, Joel Warren, Paulo Casquinha, Fabio Carvalho with Hans Joerg Mettig providing the conversion to polar view.

It is interesting to see how early on a spot broke off and moved north while than it got pushed back into the main stream of the belt.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Mutual Events page of the USNO website and marked this event on my calendar.  At 1.10am EDT, Jupiter’s moon Io started eclipsing the moon Europa and 13 minutes after the completion of this event the same moons occulted.  Since Io was moving in its orbit from the back of the planet to the front towards us, it looked like Io did not move, so the animation shows this correctly.

I captured the 0.5 hour of the events in this animation consisting of 20 frames. The event was captured with my mono DMK using a red filter. Each frame was created  by stacking 250 frames out of 500, using Registax, followed by a little sharpening.   You first see the eclipse followed by the occultation compressed in 10 second animation.

Another set of the session of last night.  This image shows the last image of the set of three together with the RGB filtered images and shows the Bird’s Strike best.  (Click image for larger view)

Jupiter w. Bird Strike on August 5, 2009.  The sky completely covered in a matter of 10 minutes when I was ready to start imaging. However, it paid off to look at the moon light painting the movement of the clouds.  After about 1/2 hour the moon showed its face again, but Jupiter kept hanging in the fringes for another 1/2 hour. When the clouds disappeared for 15 minutes, Jupiter still looked like the Stars and Stripes in a nice breeze on my laptop….

But I got my images with Bird’s Strike at the CM.  For the conditions, I am pretty happy with the result

So compare the size of Bird’s Strike to the images I made on July 24th with the “BS” at the CM.  It is stretching out real nice!

Came back from a long weekend with my wife in the NC mountains.  The sky was mostly clear of clouds but murky, but I gave Jupiter another try eventhough the Bird Strike was at the non visible side of the planet.  Here an image in pretty bad conditions, seeing as well as transparency both 4/10.