The Dutch Observatory

August 7, 2009 on 1:00 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

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.