Jupiter, Ganymede & Io Double Transit, GRS – 3 hour animation

[Dennis]

Thanks to Eric’s Jupiter events post for 16th June 2007, I found myself under the heavenly vault of twinkling stars, with very transparent but incredibly unsteady skies, attempting to record the double shadow transit of Ganymede and Io across the face of Jupiter, along with the Great Red Spot disappearing over the limb.

After failing to focus with the x2 Barlow, (seeing 3 to 4/10), I removed it and plugged the DBK 21AF04.AS (industrial) webcam into the focuser of the Mewlon 180 to see if the image scale at the F12 prime focus would show the event in sufficient detail. The answer was yes, albeit with a small image scale.

Here is an animated gif (WARNING: 240K file) of the event from 16 June 9:00pm to 17 June 00:13am. Each frame is a stack of between 62 to 331 frames from 1350 processed in Registax.

In this instance, the smaller image scale gives me the impression that I am approaching Jupiter on a space mission, rather than viewing the transit from an orbiter!

Mewlon 180 F12 at prime focus with DBK 21AF04.AS ccd camera and Tak EM200 mount.
AVI’s acquired in IC Capture.
AVI’s processed in Registax 4 to produce 39 BMP files.
BMP’s auto planetary aligned in Images Plus.
BMP converted to AVI in K3CCDTools.
Animated gif produced in Advanced Gif Animator.
Storage space provided by the nice folks at Ice In Space!

Cheers

Dennis

[Lester]

Excellent animation Dennis.

Thanks

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Great action Dennis. A nice reward for perserverance.

Yep the seeing certainly wasn't the best that night, that's for sure. 140-160 mph jetstream if I remember correctly. :rooleyes:

[iceman (Mike)]

That's great Dennis, very well registered and a nice long event, great to see the entirety of the transit.

Also interesting to see the shadows following the moons, now that we've passed opposition.

Thanks for showing me what I had no chance to see for myself.

[h0ughy (David)]

How cool is that??????????

You da man Dennis!!!!!

[John K]

That's a great animation Dennis, makes Jove look like a mini solar system outright, thanks for sharing

[matt]

That's excellent, Dennis.

The previous comments pretty much have it covered, however I'm really impressed with how smooth your animation is.

[erick (Eric)]

Dennis, that is sweet! I had convinced myself I could see the shadows creeping over the planet (I don't think so!) but your animation is just as I remember. Well done - many thanks! And GRS in transit as well - lovely.

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

It's a beaut capture.
Thanks for taking the time to post Dennis.
We appreciate the time and effort involved.

[Gargoyle_Steve (Steve)]

h0ughy had already written the words that came to mind as I watched that amazing animation...

"Dennis you are the MAN!!"

Please do not ever stop sharing your images with us.

Steve

[sheeny (Al)]

That's excellent Dennis!

Al.

[Dennis]

Thanks for those nice words – it is very nice to be able to share one’s work with others who have the same love for astronomy.

In this case, every cloud truly does have a silver lining; the seeing was so bad that I was able to leave the mount running unattended (after an, ahem, mid-course correction to tighten the clutches! ) and with the small image scale at Prime Focus, I could just sit back and enjoy the night sky.

The real hard work followed with all the processing, although even that was made easier by the smaller lumps of data to crunch through the various applications.

And we do this for fun eh?

Cheers

Dennis

[RB (Andrew)]

That is just beautiful Dennis.
Fantastic work as usual.

Thank you for sharing this with us.

[Ric]

Excellent Dennis, what an awesome animation. It had the lot in it.

A fantastic effort.

Cheers

[CoombellKid]

Very nice!!!! love it!!!!

regards,CS

[hickny (Peter)]

Dennis,
Your annimation is amazing. A break in the weather on Saturday night came too late for me to witness the event. Ganymede and Io had finished the transit. The following link http://www.skyandtelescope.com/obser...cript/jupiter#
and the latest Australian Sky and Telescope enables you to get exact times of future transits.

[davidpretorius]

aaarh, the old perfect polar alignment, start camera , go inside and have a coffee trick!

well done dennis

it is great to see something happening from QLD.