HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, automated filter wheel, ASI 462MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher






The blue sky is what it is: my passion. That I start to observ early in the evening to catch something. Anything. So here it is: Jupiter on the still bright sky. HEQ5, N250/1200, TSO ADC, ASI 224MC (cooled), home observatory, mountpusher
As usual, this is from the balcony observatory, ASI 224MC, TSO ADC, N250/1200, HEQ5. Planet tracking is done by the soapbox project. The seeing had good moments, but the low altitude of the planet and the fact that I have one of Romania’s largest cities underneath is certainly not helping, these beyond the generally shitty astroclimate of the Carpathian Basin. After the many nights I was up at 4AM to capture the planet, it has well passed the opposition by now and its going away from the horizon of my vantage point. It was an interesting collaboration: me sleep-deprived while getting some good views and Jupiter… doing what it’s been doing for billions of years now.
37 individual videos have been recorded and processed for the animation below, from 2019-07-10T18-54Z to 2019-07-10T21-50Z, each video about 3 gigabytes, equal lenght of 90 seconds, and equal gaps between.
It was a great night. The best seeing and conditions I have ever recorded a planet, to date. And it was when Io cast its shadow onto Ganymede, making the moon go partially dark.
During this morning, Ganymede played hide and seek, emerging from Jupiter’s shadow, just to disappear again, behind Jupiter’s limb. I used my usual planetary setup, ASI 224MC, TS Optics ADC, Barlow, N 250/1200, HEQ5 installed in my balconic-balcanic improvised observatory. The seeing was, this time, good to very good, with Saturn’s Cassini gap visible on the live view images, and Jupiter GRS also obvious on the live view. It’s mostly not the case, I must add. The moons are Io, Ganymede and Europa. Ganymede was part of the original recording (it was in the ROI selected for the planet), while Io and Europa are composited onto the image.
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