The skies were just clear enough to last night to entice me to set up the scope and try to image a dual transit of Io and it’s shadow across the face of Jupiter. Unfortunately it didn’t last. I hoped to image the entire one hour event but the weather worsened quickly. What you see here is an animation of 18 frames taken over 10 minutes. Every 30 seconds of real time is condensed to half a second.
Jupiter with Io, shadow of Io, and Europa April 4, 2015
I was imaging Jupiter Saturday evening and could tell during the video capture that the seeing was better than what I had seen lately. There was a feature on the disk which while I didn’t know what it was, it was persistent and I could also see the moons Io and Europa which meant the focus was holding well. When I processed the first series, which was actually the last since I started at that end, I was wowed to see that I had captures the shadow of Io on Jupiter. Woot! So, that is Io in the upper left and Europa in the lower right. Setup was an 8” Celestron SCT on an ASGT mount with an ASI120MC camera. Best 25% of 2000 10ms frames. Reducing the image size to 320×240 pixels allowed the capture of about 200 frames per second.
Jupiter Sunday March 15
It was almost exactly a month since my last chance to take a picture of Jupiter. The seeing was better but I’m not so sure of the result.
