The Dutch Observatory

Tried to image on thursday evening, but the seeing was too bad.  Last night it was a lot better.  Here the best image of the evening.  Maybe the seeing is slowly returning here.  The image shows the GRS as it just passed the CM and the oval BA has moved quite a bit.

We had two outreach programs on Wednesday October 20, but we had a lot of time in between, so we did some solar imaging.  Here an image Frank and I took of some great prominances and AR1113 at 19:21 UT

We did an outreach program at Charlie Elliott for the second group of the Children’s School in Atlanta.  At the end of the solar session, Stephen Ramsden awarded the Jon Wood Memorial Outreach award from his Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project to me.  I simply did not have any words at the time, I was too surprised.  but I would like to thank Stephen for this award, which is very dear to me for two reasons:  one, outreach to these students is very important to me in an effort to show them that there are interesting opportunities in astronomy, physics and space exploration, and second for it to be the Jon Wood Memorial Award.  To top it off, the award came with a PST CaK and a DMK31AU04.AS camera.  Thanks again Stephen!

The filament around AR1112 is still very active.  Frank and I imaged some of the filaments this afternoon.  Very cool, such a large filament.  We did see the beginning of this on Wednesday during our outreach program at CE.

Imaging Jupiter has been a challenge for me lately.  The seeing has been really bad so I have not taken much time to process the data I captured.  I might get back to that in a while when things slow down.  In the meantime I’ve been busy with outreach programs and keeping track of ISS transits.  Today we had a Sun transit at 12:45 P.M.  Frank and I went out to capture this and Art Zorka from Atlanta came out to see how we do this.  The forecast was for 31% cloud coverage, so we were prepared to miss the event.  However, the sky was clear during most of the setup, but shortly before the pass a cloud moved in…… and out.  Two minutes before the pass, I ran a test run on my camera and believe I captured another satelite transit the sun.  Than the cloud moved in and out and on the way out the transit happened.  The image shows partly clouds covering the sun while the ISS came through.

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.