From the Vault: Jupiter + Callisto Transit Animation

[iceman (Mike)]

In the From the Vault series, I feature an older image which hasn’t been seen here before and I talk about the capture and processing and hopefully highlight why this image is special to me.

The feature image in From the Vault this week is an image and animation of Jupiter with Callisto in transit. Captured almost exactly 12 months ago, on the 31st May 2008, I was excited to be imaging on this morning because capturing a Callisto transit is quite rare due to the large and lengthy orbit of Callisto around Jupiter.

Callisto has a low albedo and while transiting Jupiter it actually looks like a shadow, but it’s the Moon itself! In some frames, albedo features on Callisto can be seen - one of the rare times I’ve been able to capture detail on the darkest Galilean Moon.

Click the link below to see the images and play the 18 frame animation that covers over 3 hours of Jupiters’ rotation.

From the Vault: Jupiter and Callisto Transit Animation

The best image from the sequence was the one I entered in the SPSP17 Astro Imaging Comp over the weekend.

Thanks for looking.

[Dennis]

Hi Mike

There are some particularly stunningly detailed frames as part of the animation. The detail in the GRS is superb and some of the festoons, barges and belt details are just gorgeously captured.

As the animation downloaded, some of the belts seem to “shear” giving the impression that they were rotating at different speeds – it was quite a fascinating although totally false effect!

Oh – I’ve just read further and seen the pick of the frames – top stuff!

Cheers

Dennis