Category: Solar System

I hauled the C8 and Meade LPI out into the backyard two nights ago to get some images of Jupiter.  Here are two:  one from the beginning of the session and the other from the end.

 

00:21 UT

In this view, south is at the top and west is to the right.  The Great Red Spot (GRS) is moving out of view on Jupiter’s western limb (upper right).

Jupiter’s innermost moon Io is just barely visible to the left as a faint reddish dot.  It was actually quite easily visible in the eyepiece as a bright starlike object.

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01:28 UT

In this shot, taken a little over an hour later, the Great Red Spot has rotated out of view.

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Image & Equipment Details:
Celestron C8  203 mm f/10 Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope
3X Barlow
Meade LPI
Seeing 5/10  Trans 3/5
K3CCD_0020a5.bmp
K3CCD_0034e2.bmp
Images captured using K3CCDTools.

I finally got my C8 telescope out under the skies this past weekend and got some shots of Saturn.   I’m still climbing the learning curve, but here is an image from one video sequence. Seeing during the entire imaging session was poor to very poor with gusty winds buffeting the telescope. Despite the poor seeing, a lot of detail was lost in this image because the video was overexposed. I should be able to do better in future sessions.

Image Data:
May 29, 2011
04:40 UT
Celestron C8 203 mm f/10 SCT
3X Barlow   Meade LPI
199 stacked frames  4 fps
Seeing 1-2/5
Altitude  44.2 degrees
Eq. Diameter  18.4 arcseconds
Processing: Virtual Dub, Registax, AIP4WIN, GIMP
Image File: Saturn9VD1bRX1AIP1GP1ST199PPTWEB
Image captured using K3CCDTools.

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Here’s the raw video:
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I caught asteroid (623) Chimaera using the internet accessible 0.61 m (24-inch) Sierra Stars Observatory telescope located in Alpine County California.

(623) Chimaera is  near the center of the image moving toward the upper left.

This animation was made from three 60 second images taken on January 26, 2011 at 06:16, 07:03, and 07:15 UT.  The asteroid’s motion does not appear to be uniform because the images were not taken at equally spaced intervals.  The field of view for this image is approximately 20 arc minutes square, or a little bit less than the diameter of the full moon (the moon is approximately 30 arc minutes in diameter).

At the time these images were taken, (623) Chimaera was at magnitude 13.9 and was approximately 2.057 astronomical units or 307,722,818 km from Earth.