Jupiter's Galilean moons close dance tonight, 3rd-4th April

[andyc]

Anyone up for a challenge? All four of Jupiter's Moons will dance close to the planet tonight from late evening and through the night. The Red Spot will be transiting through the events too. There's transits and shadows of Io and Callisto, and occultations of Europa and Ganymede.

It would be amazing to see some of the top class imagers here get a detailed scene of this event, with all moons in a high resolution view. The challenge would be a timelapse of the night!

The forecast for Sydney is cloudy, so I don't think I'll get a chance to take in the view, good luck to everyone else :thumbsup:

Starry night and CalSky graphics below, CalSky times are AEST
Frame 1 - 22:37
Frame 3 - 23:37 (Io shadow ingress)
Frame 4 - 01:37

[Atmos]

Planning on setting up the 12" dob tonight so hopefully some nice views will be on order :P Just hope I can get the collimation good enough with just an aperture stop (1mm hole).

[Tinderboxsky]

I am hoping to observe these too but the weather outlook is not looking promising here.

Steve

[Nikolas]

Geez I hope Melbourne's skies just for ONCE are cloud and haze free

[geolindon]

g day Andy,

I really enjoyed some great views of the unusual grouping and events until about midnight :zzz2:. Like you i was looking foward to 'The Guns' ' pics.

Also saw many meteors (perhaps 6+/hour) in the region to the south of Jupiter, the gamma-Normids??

Cheers, L

[Tinderboxsky]

Just as Lindon did, I stayed out until just before midnight. We had clear transparent skies with the seeing steadily improving.
The highlight for me was watching Callisto complete its ingress, transit and the egress. In fact it was the clearest transit of Callisto I have had with me being able to follow it right through the transit.
By 11.30 the night was a cracker and I really wanted to stay and watch the full show but I had an early commitment this morning.

Steve

[Camelopardalis]

Was clear here until about 11pm :shrug:

[SamD]

Thanks for the challenge Andy - I wouldn't have known about it without your post.

Rather than a top class imager, I'm more economy class, but did at least manage to capture the events from Brisbane.

Seeing was good to start with, but got a lot worse as Jupiter got lower in the sky.

In the animation you can see how Io is brighter than Jupiter's surface brightness when it's near Jupiter's limbs.

The still images are more or less the times from CalSky. The satellites are as predicted, but the GRS seems to about an hour fast (30 deg longitude) in CalSky.

With a RC8, QHY5L-II colour, and Tal x3 barlow for FL 4.9m, so 0.16''/px imaging. Processed with Autostakkert and Registax wavelets.

A bit larger animation here (http://home.exetel.com.au/df/astro/default.htm?Jupiter_20160403_MoonAn imation_1218_1527.gif) ...

[andyc]

Spectacular Sam, that's brilliantly done! Great effort in catching the sequence and a few details on Ganymede too. Lovely animation :thumbsup: