The Dutch Observatory

January 19, 2015 on 1:54 pm | In Jupiter, Planets | Comments Off

In 2009 I was pretty active in Planetary imaging, including imaging the Mutual Events between the Jovian Moons.  This year Earth and Jupiter are lined up again for these events, but so far the weather has been terrible here.  Tonight however, we had clear skies and as so many times in 2009 the conditions were awful.  Although no clouds, the Jetstream and wind gusts caused seeing conditions of 1 to 2 out of 6, which translates to a very wavy planetary disk.  However, I wanted this so bad so took a chance.  Captured 48 total images in R, G, B and IR and ended up using 3 IR images. The animation shows Jupiter and its moons in IR at 02:22.0 UT, 02:35.6 UT, and 02:473.7 UT.  The shadow is from Ganymede.  Ganymede is moving from the right to the left towards the Jovian disk, while Europa which just appeared coming from behind the disk, moves to the right.  At 02:35 Ganymede which was in front occulted Europa.  (The middle image).  Apologies for the bad quality.  This was not caused by a lack of processing, and yes, the moons have been pushed a bit in levels to make them brighter in the images. Click the thumbnail to see the animation.