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Thursday night images.
17/3/2016
Peter Hill
Last thursday17 /03/16 promised to be a clear night, well it was up to as point.
Set up at 20:00 with 3 star alignment on Rukbah (Cas), Betelgeuse (Or), Mirphak (UM), but as I went to M51 , my suspicions regards murky nature of night were confirmed, more dew was evident on the 8" Newtonian and the brighter waxing Gibbous moon was reflecting off the water vapour making deep sky objects difficult to discern.
However the nights first priority was a moon and shadow transit of Jupiter, Io had been occulted at 17:50 and by the time I was set up had emerged from behind Jupiter at 20:20.
First image shows Jupiter and position of moons at 20:30, I used a 0.5x focal reduce to get all the moons and Jupiter in field of view ( had to remove extension tube on focuser to get enough inward movement). Callisto is transiting but not visible at this reduced magnification.
Second image shows Callisto in transit across North polar regions of Jupiter.
The transit of Callisto had started at 19;24 and was due to end at 21:36, it's shadow was due to start its transit at 21:10 and end at 00:08 on Friday.
Once close to the limb the moons of Jupiter are very hard to resolve so visited the moon to explore down the terminator while waiting for Callisto to move away from face of Jupiter. Was hoping to visit some deep sky objects with the pd camera but conditions not conducive.
By 22:00 the shadow of Callisto was easily identified on Jupiters surface and Callisto itself could be seen further away from the limb of Jupiter, as seen in last Jupiter slide at 22:38 again taken with focal reducer.
All images taken with neximage5 camera on 8" Newtonian on HEQ5pro, all 600 frame avi files 20fps at between 1/100" to 1/175", stacking and wavelets ( 2&3) in Registax 5.1 Labelling, compositing and polish with Photoshop 6.
Images of moon are straight wall, Davey Crater chain, once thought to be volcanic feature, now thought to be due to a bouncing meteor (after shoemaker levy on Jupiter, sunrise on the rim of Copernicus and Plato on the edge of Mare Imbrium. Taken with neximage5 600 frames at 1/150". Stacking and wavelets (2&3) in Registax 6. Polish, image rotation in Photoshop6.
I find "Discover the Moon" by J.Lacroux & C.Legrand CUP 2003 (0-521-53555-7) and "21st century Atlas of the Moon" byC.A.Wood & M.J.S.Collins Lunar Publishing (USA) 2012 (ISBN-13: 9781938228803) very useful in identifying features and providing interesting "targets". Can you identify the rest of the features in the images above??
Session finishes at 22:45, the laptop still had 30+ mins of juice left and the sky was becoming noticeably clearer, Callisto's shadow really stood out in the 8mm setting of the Baader Hyperion zoom eyepiece.
cheers
Pete H
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