The Dutch Observatory

Tonight Jupiter’s moons would be subject to another mutual event and my intentions were to try to capture some “bigger” moons this time.  The moon Io would be occulted by Europa with a total relative intensity drop of 40%.  Altough it was clear, the weather was pretty bad for observing and imaging with the image blowing all over the chip.  I did not realize that Io was not visible to start with, because it was in Jupiter’s shadow.  So I was questioning myself if the event would take place.  I started recording anyway, because I was setup .  To my big surprise, Io all of a sudden started shining a few minutes before the event and I did complete observing and recording the event despite the bad seeing.  After the fact, it would have been better to image this at f/15 rather than f/30 so the images would have been less blurry.  But I was happy to have observed and imaged my 4th mutual event this apparation!  Click the image to activate the animation!

The clear Skies continued, but the seeing was not good, with winds picking up, making Mars jump all over the chip.  Here the only presentable image from this morning. 

The sky was clear again, and I am taking every opportunity to image.  Here is Jupiter with Io transitting the CM just before Jupiter disappeared in the trees to the West.