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.
Gillam Park 4/11/2015
I birded Gillam Park in southeast Little Rock Saturday morning. I counted 36 species of birds including the Kentucky Warbler below. He was cooperative probably because he was in his secret place. Other birds weren’t as cooperative and I had to settle for views with binoculars only. Also seen were an Eight-spotted Forester, a dew covered Eastern-tailed Blue and many Horace’s Duskywings (unless they were Juvenal’s Duskywings). Other good birds were Little Blue Heron, Chimney Swift, Ovenbird, Blue-winged Warbler, Tennessee Warbler, Nashville Warbler, Hooded Warbler, and Purple Finch.
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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.
