Jupiter from tassie 23rd Feb

[davidpretorius]

hmmmmmmmm, seeing sounded as bad as Mikes, but not surprising, we had south westerlies.

The 3 planets looked fantastic and I will attempt to have a go at mercury in a few days.

I missed the io transit thanks to crap seeing, but really enjoyed the morning regardless.

Scope is nicely balanced and managed to get the filter changes / vibration down to 10 seconds.......so the season looks promising from the scopes point of view. The cooling is getting the outside of the mirror down to 2 to 3 degrees below ambient. I still get the rebound as the internal mirror temps warms it up by 1/2 degree when i turn it off, but I am very pleased so far.

Cateye collimators have left the US and wil be here soon.

As Joop gets brighter, I may even try and put in a small extension tube for better seeing nights without dropping below 30fps due to a poor histogram

[matt]

Looks promising, Dave.

What altitude was Jupiter at for this capture? I'm guessing around 25 degrees?

Still very low. You'll be flying in another month to 6 weeks.

[Matty P]

Good work Dave. :2thumbs:

Although Joop is low, you captured quite a bit of detail. Well done. :thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Good work you Tassie transit chaser. Looks like you're getting in some good practice for the new season.

Cheers

Dennis

[davidpretorius]

according to astrocalc and starry night, 35 degrees at 6am from my location.

Yes, it is pretty much practise at this stage...........I also dont want to fall into the trap of trying to get the best image only, i would like to have a more scientific approach this year

[matt]

Intriguing.

What does this 'more scientific approach' entail?

BTW...I'm surprised it's already at 35 degrees by 6am in Tas this time of year. That's good news.

[davidpretorius]

previous years i have been trying to improve on the last image and delete anything else, but this year i want to post everything and try and observe changes etc

[matt]

Cool.

I've been thinking along similar lines. Was thinking of buying an external hard drive (300Gig) to use exclusively for astro archiving.

Good stuff, Dave. Looking forward to your images.

[iceman]

Nice work Dave. Shame about the seeing. I've only got 1 avi from yesterday which i'm not rushing to process (cause it's not good). I'll process it on the train tomorrow morning.

I'm out this morning as well (5 mornings in a row! Unheard of!) but again the seeing is bad..... really bad. Let me go check the eyepiece again in case it's improved.
[edit]nope, still shocking. Can't even see the GRS, just two brown belts :(