Nothing like the feeling that Jupiter is looking back at you! Almost offset that I was starting to loose feeling everywhere else. God it was a cold night to be out there, then a wind blast hits you, makes it worse and shakes the scope. Any normal Jupiter night and I'd have been back inside without a moments thought. The view was just too extraordinary though, to the left is Io (in front of the planet) just poking out. Europa (upper) and Callisto are just off to the other side. And Io is casting a shadow right on top of the great red spot. The position of the moon relative to the shadow tells you something of Jupiter's alignment to the Sun relative to our position.

Last night I produced my 25th Jupiter drawing from this season. My goal is 50 before its too low to work with, I should have 3 months to get that done. Kind of an added bonus, I saw a feature on the northern band I'd never seen before. Looked a lot like the GRS, not quite as big but still gigantic and considerably darker.

Finally, a weekend with 2 clear nights. I love being home when the Sun has set but the sky is still light blue to draw Jupiter. Somehow with the contrast beaten back the detail really comes out. 3 in a weekend (1 Friday night, 2 Saturday), quite the treat. It's kinda neat to get more than one in a night, the GRS was not apparent when I did the first, 2 hours later totally in yer face.

I love the sessions where the GRS is actually kinda obvious. Maybe in part because it's clarity is tied to the kind of observer planetary drawing has made me. I got up at 3 the following morning cause Io was not only casting a shadow but the moon itself was against a darker band, I was hoping I could pick it out. Saw the shadow, sadly not the moon.

Oh man was Jupiter great last night. I've seen as much detail on occasions but never more. There was a clear shadow being cast, I looked it up, it was from Europa. When I was all done I took one last look before breaking everything down and saw that the one moon not previously visible was emerging from behind the planet. I thought I was seeing the shadow of one moon and another coming around from behind. Turns out though that it was Europa in front of Jupiter, so though I was seeing great planetary detail I did not notice a tiny white ball in there. I almost decided to draw it again really fast - it be cool to capture the planet, a moon looking like an emerging pimple and a shadow ... but the cold was getting to me!!

11/28 - what a great night to have the scope out! First, Jupiter was really close to the full Moon. With a 40mm eyepiece (36X) I was able to see a portion of the Moon on one side and Jupiter and it's moons on the other side, very nice. Then I zeroed in on the planet for a sketch and caught a moon just coming out from behind. They don't want that sort of thing when you submit images, but sometimes you need to do what's fun.

I posted this on facebook as I often do, but with a nice and unexpected twist. 6 people liked it ... among them Wayne Jaeschke!

Hey all,

In the last couple of months I was only been able to image Jupiter twice, so here are some of my results:

August 13, 2012.

Conditions were fairly good (I still don't know exactly how some people rate seeing conditions on the scale of 1-10... ), but if I had to guess, it was maybe 7? Some details are visible, there is even blue regions present  in the equatorial zone. South is up, since GRS is in the South Equatorial Belt.

 Now, here is image from October 23, 2012

Unfortunately, it does not look much more detailed, although it should given few reasons:
1. It is higher up in the sky, so there is less atmosphere
2. It is closer to us and therefore it's angular diameter is bigger and it is brighter.

There are couple reasons why the image is not superior: conditions got bad really fast at by the time I ended shooting Blue channel, there was so much haze that visually I could only see no more than 5 stars in the sky. My histogram brightness fell drastically from the moment I started on Red channel. Another problem is that I only recorded at 15 fps, since I wanted to make shutter speed slower than 1/30 sec., from last time I knew the camera was making small distortions event at 30 fps.. but the next slowest rate was 15 fps, not 27 fps which I thought would be possible. Bad judgment and brain cramp on my part.

Btw, the black blurry dot on the surface of the planet is a shadow of the moon Io that was making a pass across the planet.

So, generally there is ton of things to improve on, and with the new camera coming in soon, there ability to shoot at 60 fps will be possible, so in theory we will have much crisper images coming in soon.


Vlad.