The Dutch Observatory

Venus is getting ready for a nice conjunction with the Moon on December 31, while Jupiter and Mercury will have their own conjunction at that time. This image, two days before the event, shows nicely how all four of them are getting ready for this.  (From top to bottom: Venus, moon, Jupiter, Mercury)

The images below are the “Perigee Moon”, the biggest moon of the year.  The moon today is closesed to Earth in its eliptical orbit around the Earth.  It also is about 14% wider and 30% brighter today than lesser Moons of the year.  I took the images half way between my house and Hard Labor Creek Park, since the moon rise was obstructed from my home.  I am glad I drove half a mile and ended up with these images.

Calsky did forecast a very bright flare from Iridium 5 for tonight.  When talking to Jon Wood, he suggested to take the camera out, set it at 30 seconds and “let it rip”.  Well I did not set it at 30 seconds, because I wanted to control when to end the exposure, but positioned the camera well so it would pass throught the field of view.  As announced, Iridium 5 came thru and flared above my head with the left solar panel, but then came the nice flare from the right panel on the way down.  the brightness peaked at -6.3 and was brighter than Venus in the west.  Here my 55mm, 51 second image at f5.6 and ISO1600.

My house, where I took the image, was only 2100 feet from the center line of the flare. The red area along the wire, is a red tape moving in the wind. The tape is tied around the telephone wire crossing the road.

In addition, there were some thin clouds in the field of view with the moon shining right above them.

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter came in a beautiful conjunction in the evening of December 1, 2008.  Since the forecast was cloudy skies for Social Circle, I went out the night before and captured some images from the trio the night before, just in case.  However, after a cloudy sky all day long, the skies over Walton county cleared up between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon and gave way to a beautiful sight.  Here, two images of the nigt of the conjunction (Venus and Jupiter are 2 degrees apart), and one from the night before.

It was still freezing early in the morning, but here another image of Saturn from this morning.  In addition to the temperature, a slight breeze and high clouds put a damper on the fun of imaging….. 

Anyway, this image is just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, Happy Turkey Day!!!

Jupiter is getting too low to image from my home, so have to start focussing on Saturn. The forecast for last night was great, but when I finished the setup at 4:30am this morning, a front of clouds was moving in. The temperature was freezing and my fingers felt like they froze off…. Around 5:45am I started shutting my laptop down, but than noticed an area opening up so got ready again.

This is my first Saturn of this apparition season. Not great, but I am happy with the result. Hopefully it will get better when I can spend more time on the imaging under a little higher temperatures .

Tonight, November 20th, was the third night in a row that I observed the ISS when it flew over our area. Jon Wood decided to go to CE and I joined him. I have tried several times to capture the ISS on previous flybys but never managed to get a close up. The star trail images were as close as I got….. until today.

After many failed attempts, finally a closer image.  Exposure is a problem because of the direct reflection of the sun on the Shuttle, but I am pretty happy with the result of this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked on the ISS. Today is also the 10th aniversary of the International Space Station.  And while I took this image, an EVA was in progress and spacewalkers Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper and Shane Kimbrough were working on the starboard solar alpha rotary joint. Click on the image below for a larger picture, or Click here for a short movie with all 31 images of the flyby.

I’ve put some of the images taken of Jupiter from April until the middle of November and created this composite showing Jupiter as it appeared in 2008.  When put in context with each other it becomes very visible when the images are not processed the same.  This year was focussed on making improvements in capturing and the way I process images and get a basic understanding of the overall color balance.  So next year I will need to focus more on getting a unifirm color balance in all images.  We’ll see how I do on that! 

Jupiter is moving rapidly westward towards Venus, and with this, every day it sits lower in the early evening sky.  Here another Jupiter image under medium to low conditions made on Monday evening November 10, 2008 from Charlie Elliott observing field. 

Jon decided to go to Charlie Elliott for some guided imaging last night and I decided to join him for a while.  I ran into some issues and had problems aligning my scope, but before that, I was able to run some Jupiter images since Jupiter is blocked by some trees from home.  Jupiter is getting smaller every night and very low in the sky from our location.  Here the two images I took.