The Dutch Observatory

The weather has been very bad again for almost a week.  Yesterday I tried to image Mars and made 4 runs but the result were pretty bad, so I did not post them.  The same as I did last week twice.  Today the conditions were a little better although I did not think seeing came above 2/10 because of occasional winds, the jetstream, and my buddy Stephen Ramsden kept sending those planes departing Atlanta over my house, in fact it looked like he wanted to position them in the middle  between Mars and Pollux and he was pretty good at that.   The result was that all of the runs were impacted at least in one color by a vortex created by those planes.  Anyway, the seeing was not good anyway, so I forgive Stephen.  Here Mars on the 27th February around 2:13 UT

Finally!!   We had some “fantastic” seeing today compared to the conditions of the last many months.  I can’t remember any more when it was this nice.  The 150+ mile/hour winds of the jetstream above had moved around Atlanta and except for an occasional blurp, the image was steady.  With these conditions I had to try out an old barlow, a 3x Klee which let me image at f 38.  Something I have never done before, and which would have made some bad images in the very unstable conditions we’ve had.  The image shows clouds in Elysium, clouds at the morning limb and a streak of clouds south of the NPC.

I just imaged a nice Iridium Flare.  Iridium 14 reflected the sun with its right antenna with a brightness of -7.4 and the center line was only 600 meters from my home!  What a treat!   In addition, it passed by in Monoceros very close to Orion, so I decided to make the shot wider so I would get Orion, Sirius and Procyon in the same view.  I hope you like the image as much as I do.

It’s been a long time since we had half way decent conditions.  Tonight’s transparency was a little over average, but seeing was still low because if high winds.  Here my image of Mars from today. Clouds visible over Utopia, Arabia and at the evening limb. 

We had some “clear” skies after yesterday’s rain, but the next front was moving in fast. I managed to get a few images while some thin layers of clouds passed through. Seeing was fair but very humid and freezing. After three runs, my corrector plate started to freeze over and I had to stop before the clouds moved in again.  For this image I replaced the Celestron Shorty plus barlow with the cell of the Meade 140 2x barlow with an 4″ extention.