The Dutch Observatory

I thought the previous image was the best from last night. Guess I was wrong. Here an image from a few minutes earlier with also the moons Io and Europa.

It seemed a nice evening but because of the limited oportunity time (between two trees) and several airplanes leaving Atlanta causing disturbance, the conditions were not great.  In addition, the planet is now very low in the sky.  Despite that, I gave Jupiter another try.  Here the best image of three taken around 8:00pm eastern, from Social Circle on October 30, 2008.

Saturday evening when trying to image for the first time a deep sky object with my DMK, I ran out of power on my laptop.  Sunday evening I gave it another try.  Here an unguided image of NGC7662, a planetary nebula in Andromeda, also called the Blue Snowball.  The nebula is 2200 light years away and is 28×32 arc seconds in size and has a magnitude of 8.3.   Last year I did the same object with my Canon.  The image is a composite of LRGB images with each filter 25 frames of 23 seconds each for a total exposure time of approx. 45 minutes (The L component was made with a UV-IR block filter).  Because of the long exposure and not being guided the image does not show too much detail, but the double shell and the center star ar visible.

Transparency was decent but somehow the seeing was not as I was hoping for.  However, I could not resist imaging while the GRS was sliding off the planetary disk and at the same time Europa was getting ready to disappear behind Jupiter.

Here the image from the evening of October 19th 2008 from Charlie Elliott.

I was out of town in Upstate New York for about two weeks (Cold), and last week was rainy and cloudy.  So this was my first decent evening out again in about a month.  This is an RGB and IRGB image of the filtered images taken around 19:57 local time.  1500 images each color at 1/60 sec. with 1000 images stacked in Registax and post processed in Photoshop.

One of the four images in the next post was made just a few minuted past 8:00pm local time. Here the filtered and the IRGB image with the relevant information. For these runs I captured 1500 frames per channel and ended up stacking 1000 per channel.

Jupiter last night September 13, 2008.
We had planned an observing session at Charlie Elliott, but around 4:00pm we did scrub it because of the clouds. However, around 7:00pm it cleared up but the seeing was still below normal, so I set up at the “Dutch Observatory” with the intent to image for an hour. When it started to get dusk, Jupiter had moved dangerously close to my neighbour’s pine tree but I managed to get 5 sets in. (I need to talk to the guy accross my property if I can start setting up there . Here 4 of the 5 sets.

Jupiter was an interesting object last night.  Io did transit the planet while the shadows from Io and Callisto were visible on the planetary disk.  We were supposed to have bad weather, but most of the clouds moved out at a few minutes before 8:00 EDT, but some residual thin clouds stayed around and made the seeing terrible. 

I wanted to give it a try and see if I could get anything.  Here three images made in terrible seeing, but the shadows are visible.  However, there is not sufficient detail to make out Io against the background of Jupiter.

Thursday evening September 5th, turned out to be half decent but difficult.  Right after sunset, the clouds started breaking up some more at Charlie Elliott observing field and allowed me to make a few images of Jupiter.  As the night went on the clouds got denser again and around 11:00pm we had a solid overcast.

Here two images made between some clouds. 

Wednesday the clouds from Gustav started clearing and the sky was clear and stable as it had not been in a while.  This was an opportunity to test my new barlow lens.  A 2x Williams Optics.  Used in the binos.  It screws right in the filter thread of the DMK.  Used with the CPC925 and the DMK21AU04.AS in this way it gives an effective focal ratio of F13.  I ran 7 sets that night, one of them with the Celestron 2x Shorty Plus cell used in a similar way.  The latter one gave a 2x maginifcation, but the focus for this barlow seems to be very critical.  Just as the test images from last month show.

Here the two best sets from this night.