The Dutch Observatory

No this is not the Moon, we have a two day full harvest moon.  It is the cresent Venus as the ISS made a transit accross Venus from the driveway of a friend of mine.  Frank Garner and I have been waiting a long time for this opportunity and we are very happy with this.  Please note that this is a daytime pass at 4:38 P.M. local time and the sun is still 33 degrees high and 30 degrees from Venus.  Venus was shining at a magnitude of -4.2 and the brightness of the ISS was -1.2, a difficult spread to manage in bright daylight.

OK, I got my sanity back.  It almost has been three weeks since I have had any halfway decent seeing.  Yesterday it was so bad I could not even get Jupiter focussed.  I started thinking that my camera might be broken.  Well today it showed that it was not.  Periods of reasonable seeing of several seconds at a time during the imaging sessions made me feel better again    Here the best image from last night which was one day before opposition and Jupiter is a whopping 49.9 arc seconds.  I hope that tonight the seeing becomes terrific for opposition, but we’ll see.

Today Frank and I tried for another ISS transit on the center line just at the other side of Hard Labor Creek Park.  We missed the Moon transit earlier this week, because of a storm that came through an hour before.  The sun was active with several sunspots, so we wanted to get these also in the image.  The image sequence was started a minute before the transit and stopped 15 seconds after the transit completed.  The transit accross the sun took 1.25 seconds. The ISS was at a distance of 696 km (435 miles).  At 26.6 Arc Seconds, the diameter of the ISS was 1/72 of that of the sun.  The images show also the active sunspots 1102, 1105 and 1109 at the Western limb of the sun.

Another night where I thought the conditions would be great, but the seeing was about the same as the day before.  Where are the seeing conditions from the middle of August gone?

Skies are clear after a period of cloudy skies.  However the seeing did not live up to the forecast, but it was good being out again.  I am not happy with the result, but I guess you cannot get more than what you can capture.