Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

My first opportunity to photograph a moon shadow on Jupiter occurred on Tuesday evening as Calisto moved out from the planet just after dusk. The ’seeing’ was pretty bad so I used the 9.25 Celestron without the x2 barlow and used the IR filter again. This f/10 combination enabled me to keep the individual exposures fairly short with a 10 fps framerate (the IR filter doesn’t let a great deal of light through!).

The final image is a stack of about 1500 frames (from an original video of 2300 frames). The Great Red Spot is also visible just to the right of the shadow.

 Friday night was forecast to clear before midnight so I made the trip over to the observatory to setup the Celestron 9.25. Right on cue, the clouds cleared (first time that’s happened in a long time) and I got quite a few 3 & 4 minute videos with the webcam and a narrow band IR filter (742nm). This is the result from the last video of the evening at about midnight, 800 frames stacked in Registax 5 with some additional processing in GIMP. Click on the image for a larger view.

This image shows more detail than I’ve captured before and I put this down to the better than average seeing and a slight tweak to the telescope collimation. Jupiter is very close to opposition and has an apparent diameter of almost 50 arc seconds at the moment. The Great Red Spot is just creeping into view just below the equator on the left hand side.

Many people are familiar with the Leo Triplet of galaxies, M65, M66 and NGC 3628. In the Southern skies there’s a similar formation in the constellation Pavo of NGCs 6769, 6970 & 6971 at a distance of 190 million light years. All three galaxies are interacting and whilst the cores consist of elderly reddish stars the spiral arms are lit up with clumps of new stars formed by the gravitation interactions.

Many other members of the Pavo galaxy group are also visible in this picture.

This image was obtained with GRAS-008 and is a composite of 10x 5 minute exposures. The image has ben scaled down by a factor of 3 for display on this blog.