The Dutch Observatory

Tomorrow the LCROSS will impact the crater Cabeus on the South Pole on the moon.  Dan Schmitt and I spend some time last week getting familiar with the area where the impact will happen.  This morning I made a trial run of the event.  Here are two of the images made of the crater and impact area.  The Centaur upper stage is anticipated to impact at 7:31:30 and LCROSS is following at 7:35:45 Easter Time.  In the left image the impact location is in the right wing of the dark area a little left of the center, just behind the brighter spot.  (Reminds me of a soaring Eagle)  Tomorrow I intend to use another barlow whith a little more magnification and center around this area.  Keep my fingers crossed that not in the last minute a cloud will obscure the event as 4 months ago when a 1/2 hour storm came though as I was ready to image an ISS transit of the Sun.

Reprocessed images of Mars from September 29 and October 1st.  Click the image for the full size.  (Images are at 200% of original).

The weather was turning again and the conditions were not good, so setup and imaged Jupiter again. The GRS and the shadow of Ganymede are visible.

The streak in better seeing continued for another day, so I took the opportunity to make another image from Mars.  Very humid this morning, but enough to capture this image without dewing over of the scope.  Philegra just visible on the left and Aetheria almost at the CM with Elysium in between, while Syrtis Major rises at the following limb.

Tonight was the night with the best seeing conditions of the year so far.  Transparency and seeing was well above normal altough it could have been better.  I made imags over a period of 45 minutes with the Williams Optics barlow.  these images have been used in the animation (middle thumbnail).  Two of them are shown as individual composites (bottom two thumbnails).  I than made two images using the Celestron 2x barlow, which gives a longer focal ratio.  I had to stop the exposure speed to 1/19 sec. and limit the number of frames to have sufficient light for a good histogram and to limit the rotation blur of the planet (top thumbnail)

Here the images from the evening of September 30th,  (October 1 UT) 

Here Jupiter with the GRS on September 29th.   Conditions were better than average with humidity and temperature being very pleasant. 

To use the change in weather, I had to do Mars this morning.  Jupiter did not work out last night but this morning the seeing was good, but the humidity really was high.  I barely made it for one image before I started noticing a drop in luminace in the capture program as my primary started to show signs of condensation.  The 12 Volt hair dryer did wonders!  Here the image from this morning.  Aetheria visible on the evening limb, Syrtus Major extending on the right to the equator on the right half of the image and Nodus Alcyonius noticeable in between.

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.

Following Tuesday evening we had some terrible storms.  However we did not get the worst.  Other areas of Atlanta were much worse of than we were.  In addition, my house is at a high elevation compared to many other areas, so we did not have any flooding at all.  Thursday night, the sky opened up again, but unlike the West side of the state, 60 miles East of Atlanta we had mediocre tranparency, but because I had “image fever” I did setup again and the result is not much better than the bad images of  Tuesday.  Here one of my images of Thurday evening.

We have had over two weeks of rain, clouds and other terrible weather. This as the first night where I could see some stars. The transparency was terrible but stability was OK, so I setup and probably made the worst image of this season. You can call it the “Image of Desperation”