Dragon's Eye News

This is an excellent movie of Jupiter going through a full rotation as the New Horizons spacecraft flew by it in 2007.

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Here are some recent photos taken with my Celestron C8 and new CG-5 mount. The photos aren't all that great but I wanted to post about them anyway. It's been cloudy the last week and I'm going through astronomy withdrawal.

I forgot to post about this yesterday, which was the 400th anniversay of the discovery by Galileo of Jupiter's moons Europa, Callisto and Io. Yeah Galileo!

Go out and look at Jupiter tonight through at least some binoculars. You'll see a larger bright dot with smaller dots nearby. Today the average person has much better optics than Galileo had. Go look!

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The seeing wasn't good on the 4th but I did manage to get a shot of Io casting a shadow on Jupiter. This is the best 839 frames out of about 2000 taken with my camcorder and stacked with registax.

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Got a few good shots using the camcorder. It does really well on the moon but not as good as the Canon SD750 for Jupiter. Still, fun to play with.

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This was from the best 314 images out of 800 taken with a Canon SD750 in video mode @ 640x480

The seeing was so-so and the GEM wasn't fully aligned. Got this just before the clouds rolled in this morning.

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This is from NASA via Tom's Astronomy Blog

Look carefully and you'll see moons and moon shadows zip by along the meridian with the Great Red Spot roiling just below center. Follow the link for more info.

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At Frisco Starfest on Aug 8 we were treated to fairly decent views of Jupiter. The clearest I've seen yet, due to the fact there aren't any heat-releasing houses surrounding the scope.

I thought that there were two moon shadows but it turns out that Callisto is dark enough relative to Jupiter that I could see it along with the shadow it was casting onto Jupiter.

Callisto is the lighter dot toward the center of Jupiter and its shadow is to the right of that.

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Woke up in the middle of the night wide awake and decided to see what was happening in the sky this morning.

At first I found that there was a thin layer of clouds obscuring everything but soon enough those went away and the sky became fairly clear and moonless.

I spent some time just looking at Jupiter and playing around before pulling out the cameras and a new holder I made last night that fits all my cameras and also fits over all my current eyepieces.

The nylon screws ensure that the eyepieces won't be scratched yet hold the camera securely to said eyepieces.

I took several shots of Jupiter before moving over to look at M31, the Andromeda nebula and M32. I see now that I should have gone looking for M110 as well but I guess I'll have to do that another morning.

I got some halfway decent shots of Jupiter both before Ganymede moved into Jupiter's shadow

and after. The moon's gone!

Afterward I attempted a 15 second shot (the longest my camera is capable of) of M31 which came out ok.

It looks like a big fuzzy patch which is pretty much what I see through the scope.

Things look quite a lot sharper through the scope and I have some hope I'll be able to get better pictures with practice.

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It was another good morning for observing. I set up the scope at 4:30am and started out by observing Jupiter for a bit and using some fuzziness I saw along one edge to tweak the collimation of my scope. I know I can get better collimation out of it but I got as good as I could pending more practice.

I moved on to M31 for a bit and attempted to find a couple of open clusters (no luck, probably the magnification was too high) before moving back to Jupiter and its moons Io, Ganymede and Europa in order outward from the planet.

I tried to get a picture and was partially successful.

It's a bit fuzzy but not too bad

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