Europa emerging from shadow, 30July08

[StephenM (Stephen)]

Hi All,

I had a nice little observing session last night in Brisbane. Started off with a GRS transit at about 8:15pm. Seeing wasn't brilliant, but could still make out the GRS through my 130mm Newt at 100x using an 80A blue filter during periods of better seeing.

Then spent a bit of time on the Lagoon nebula (M8) and Omega nebula (M17) using 50x and my new skyglow filter. First time I've tracked down M17, and the view was pretty impressive especially with the filter. The bar and hook were very prominent. Then a quick look at globular cluster M22 (impressive) before swinging the scope back to Jupiter

At about 9:25pm Europa emerged from Jupiter's shadow. This was the first time I've seen one of the moons do this, and it was great to see it brighten over a minute or 2 as the disk moved into the sun. These events are quite common, and I'll be looking out for more over the next few weeks! If you haven't seen an event like this, I suggest you look out for them!

All in all a pretty enjoyable couple of hours!

Cheers,
Stephen

[NQLD_Newby]

Nice report Stephen, I'll have to watch out for the moons emrging as you say. Sounds exciting. Thanks for sharing.

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks stephen. I remember doing some imaging 2 years ago and capturing Ganymede coming out of Jupiter's shadow. I even managed to captured the crescent shape on Ganymede as it emerged.

Was quite exciting.