Jupiter and Ganymede in great seeing, my best this year!
Seeing was great this morning, 12th May local time, the best I’ve had all year. Ganymede was approaching Jupiter, soon to begin transit.
Here’s one of the 11 images I captured from this morning - the first one to be fully processed and one of the best from the session. The others are still at various stages of processing - more to come in the next day or so - plus an animation of course!
There is an NEB outbreak setting on the bottom left, as well as a large rift on the NEB rotating into view on the right. Ganymede has a number of albedo markings too, including a bright spot on the southern tip.
After the shocking run of seeing I’ve had this year so far, finally the good seeing is starting to come. I can’t tell you what a joy it was to process this image after the rubbish I’ve been processing for months!
More details to come when the final images and animation are ready.
Its amazing how much detail you can get in these shots, especially considering that Jupiter is over 750,000,000 km away! its almost like you are in orbit.
Thanks guys, i'm very happy to have finally lucked out with the seeing. It may have even got a little bit better, but I had to stop at 5:30am to get ready for work and catch a 6am train!
I can't wait for the Sun to start rising earlier again!
The GRS has definitely been very elusive, but i'm out here again this morning and the GRS is right at the CM. Unfortunately the seeing isn't very good yet but hopefully it will improve before the GRS sets.
The peltier cooling was an absolute necessity yesterday - temps dropped to about 4deg here near Gosford, but I had the cooling turn on automatically between 1:50am and 3am and when I got up at 3:30am, the mirror was already within 0.5 of ambient.
Cheers again, i'll hopefully post the final images and animation later today.
Already commented on POTN, but again - outstanding image. I've been getting up early the last couple of days and noticed you "online" here. Now I realise you've been imaging while we all sleep. Well worth it