The Dutch Observatory

It has been coming a long time.  An image of the ISS transitting our Sun.  The last attempt this past Monday failed because of last minute confusion about the time.  Today Frank Garner and I set out to capture this afternoon’s Sun transit of the ISS on its 67033 orbit since its launch on November 20, 1998.  The distance to the ISS was 405 kilometers.  The angular size of the satellite was 47.2″, which makes it 1/40th of the diameter of the Sun.  The ISS came close to Sunspot AR1092 and some nice solare proms are visible also.  We almost missed this pass as an object passed accross the field of view about 20 seconds prior to the ISS, which we first thought was an early pass.  We stuck to our imaging plan and caught the right pass on time. It also appears that the transfer between the camera and my laptop was quite busy, since it skipped a few images in the sequence.

The first morning since my C11 with transparency and seeing reasonable.  I captured a lot more detail, but need to work on the collimation some more.  Jupiter on July 29th, the GRS and Oval BA are very pale.  Need to work some more on my color balance.

I had a chance to roughly collimate my scope Sunday evening, but the conditions were bad.  The forecast for this morning were bad also and I had not planned on imaging.  However, I saw a hole in the sky when I got up at 5:30 A.M..  When I was ready to image, a band of clouds had moved in.  I managed to get half the avi of the red image to be OK but the green and blue were made through clouds.  Here is the second image with the C11.  As far as I am concerned this is not bad considering the conditions.  Here Jupiter with the GRS, Oval BA, and Europa at the preceding limb.

I have changed my imaging platform from the C925 to the C1100.  I now have to get familiar with an equatorial mount.  I am using the EQ6 which seems to be a good mount, but using it is different than the fork arms of the CPC925.  I have been fighting the weather checking this out.  For now the scope is mounted on a tripod in my observatory until I have a new top plate for this mount for my pier.  I also am waiting for better conditions to get the collimation right.  Here my first image under marginal conditions with Jupiter being below 30 degrees high.

As a practice for the attempt to image the ISS transit of the sun on Monday morning, Frank Garner and I made a testrun yesterday.  Here two images of Sunspot AR1089 through an H-alpha filter.

Thin high clouds moved through this morning, requiring longer exposure time, but I was able to get one decent image.  Here Jupiter and the GRS with Oval BA getting closer to the GRS.   Also notice by comparing to the image of 7/05/2010 how the white spot in the NTropZone and the dark spot in the NTempZone have moved closer.

It is good to be back from New York again and being able to do some imaging.  This morning seeing and transparency was about average and I made a few images of Jupiter.  Here the last image of the session with the GRS getting ready to turn around the corner.  The Oval BA and the GRS are getting closer and it will be interesting to see the close encounter when they reach each other in a few months.

Steve Philips mentioned the Io transit for July 7 in his presentation last month.  Here an image of Jupiter with Io, just before it ends its transit accross the planetary disk at the preceding limb .  Conditions were less than fair with thin bands of clouds moving though.

Set the alarm for 4:30 and imaged Jupiter again this morning.  Made three runs, but stopped since I did not see many good frames being recorded.  Here the best of the three.

Jupiter on July the 4th.  The images came out better than I anticipated based on the conditions.  Here the image just before 5:00 A.M. local time and an RGB only image taken about 15 minutes later.