Wednesday 12 March 2014

Jupiter - always interesting

I "videoed" Jupiter on the 8 inch Schmidt-cassegrain at the observatory tonight (11th March 2013). I got better results with just the 2x barlow than with 2 2x barlows. I was operating at f/20-22 (focal length just over 4m) and exposures of 1/54 of a second. I captured 2500 frames in 1min40, and stacked the best 1760 of them in Registax 6. The three moons made a beautiful triangle and Callisto cast a rare shadow on to the disk - something I noticed in the eyepiece, plus the red spot was in view. What chance! The Imaging Source (non-cooled) DBK colour camera was pushed into the scope and off I went. The moons to the right were (top to bottom) Europa, Io, Callisto - and you can see it is Callisto causing the shadow. Each moon seemed to have an independent motion to each other as the conjunction developed over the course of an hour or two.

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