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I sometimes have a look at observations from the middle of last century and wonder what's happened. Have scopes got worse? Have observers lost patience with careful viewing, expecting to see Hubble type stuff through their scope? Has seeing got worse?
Here is a quote from B M Peek's The Planet Jupiter from 1958
With a 2" telescope...the shadows of the satellites may be readily seen as little black dots...on the disk of the planet. A 3", working under good conditions, will reveal that the belts....are not entirely regular but show darker patches or condensations and sometimes projections at the edges. An occasional bright spot may be seen with a 3", particularly if it partly overlaps one of the belts.
These old guys, often using only a 6" scope, would record times that features on Jupiter crossed Jupiter's central meridian to an accuracy of 2min. In this way they could track the atmospheric currents in the clouds
Bloody amazing!
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