Europa

[bird]

I'm stacking a lot of frames along the way to making an animation of the Europa/Io occultation from the 12th.

Each frame of the animation is the best 250 out of 1200 frames, and I kept seeing a persistent set of light and dark patterns on Europa in each frame, so in the end I gave in and stacked together all the finished animation frames (24 frames so far) centered just on Europa and here is the result.

I'll do this again when I'm finished all 64 frames of the animation, but I'm reasonably confident that this is real and not imagined... this represents the best 5000 out of 28000 frames...

Europa is 0.9" in diameter, the smallest of the galileans.

cheers, Bird

Edit: ps this is red channel only.

[matt]

If you can confirm those details...that's an excellent achievement, Anthony.

I'd say the fact that the features are consistent across frames is a fair indication they are real and not artifacts etc

Well done....another outstanding achievement:thumbsup:

[iceman]

Stunning! First time I've seen albedo features on Europa! Brilliant.

This could be a season of firsts for you Anthony!

[Quark]

Well done Bird,

What an achievement, not only on a personal level, but for Australian amateur astronomy.

Such planing and persistence and attention to detail. Congratulations on this outstanding effort.

A legend indeed.
Regards
Trevor

[bird]

Yeah, next time there's some good seeing I'm going to take a break from J and concentrate on the satellites instead...

ps I'm off to Sydney tomorrow to pick up most of the metalwork for the new 16" scope (Nemesis) :-)

Bird

[bird]

Here's the last one for now - this is 32 frames of the animation realigned and stacked, and I've done both Europa and Io so you can see the difference.

Io is dark at the poles and so it doesn't appear round. Europa still shows much the same set of features.

So this is 8000 frames stacked out of 38400. Io is 1" in diameter.

cheers, Bird

[HolyWars]

Thats really cool!!!:scared:

[h0ughy]

WOW, how excellent is that in achieving results like that

[RobF]

Just gobsmacking.
Thanks for showing what amateurs can set their sights on these days!

[bird]

Worth remembering that this was recorded as part of the Io/Europa occultation that happened at 6.26am... The portion I've processed so far would be from 6.05am to about 6.20am or so, well past the best seeing for the night. If I'd recorded this an hour earlier then the results would have been much much better :-)

Next time gadget.... next time...

Bird

[bird]

Here we go... mid transit frames showing Europa passing in front of Io.

Note some clarity is lost because I can't do a multipoint align here, and there is a lot of relative motion between the two objects.

Looks like maybe 50% overlap at the midpoint.

cheers, Bird

[Paul Haese]

Great results mate, wanna pass some of that seeing on? Well done.