The Dutch Observatory

September 28, 2009 on 7:14 pm | In Jupiter, Planets | Comments Off

Finally some good seeing conditions!!  I made 6 images over the span of 1/2 hour.  Than changed the barlow and used the Celestron Shorty plus with my 1 1/2″ extension tube and made two more images.  the increased size of the image required me to drop the exposure time from 1/77 sec to 1/19 sec and had to adjust the gain also.

The top thumbnail links to the animation showing Jupiter’s rotation for 1/2 hour and also shows the moon Ganymede orbitting behind Jupiter while it looks like it is appraoching the planet from the left.  Callisto is passing in front of the disk closing in on the preceding limb. (black dot)  Europa is moving accross the disk towards the CM in the Equitorial Zone.  Some of the images also had Io on the right of the planet, but I did crop that out, since not all images had this.