Jupiter's Moons & GRS

[Hankmeister3]

I was rummaging around some of my photo files in the first few months of my picking up amateur astronomy again as a serious hobby. I found a string of Jupiter image files from 6/13/2018 which were about two months into my re-entry in astrophotography. Jupiter happened to be at a favorable position and I threw down on my backyard deck my tripod, mount and a very recently acquired SkyMax 180mm f/15 Maksutov with a 2700mm focal length.

I was familiar with eyepiece projection from the early 1980s when I was doing a small amount of color film (ASA 400 Kodacolor) astrophotography with a Meade 10-inch f/5.5 and also doing my own negative processing and color printing with a Dichroic head Beseler enlarger as a semi-professional photographer.

So I dropped my 70's era 12.5mm orthoscopic eyepiece into a 1.25 eyepiece projection set-up that I still had in my astronomy storage box and mounted my also newly acquired Canon EOS 77D with T-ring adopter on the assembly. After about an hour of dinking around (I hadn't even checked the collimation of the SkyMax) I focused the image of Jupiter as best I could on the Canon's LCD screen and snapped away. So my first light with the 180mm Maksutov yielded these three out of about 75 images I took that night of Jupiter.

I remember the sky conditions from my backyard as being about a Pickering 3 to 3.5 with a lot of suburban sky glow but it was a relatively low humidity night. I also tried my hand at a few DSOs like M13 and M27 but ended up very disappointed in the results. And the f/15 Maksutov is not exactly the most efficient way of imaging DSOs but boy did it produce a great image scale! Plus, I was still unfamiliar with my EQ6-R Pro mount and I didn't even know what a "PEC track" was though I did know about periodic error from building my first clock-driven sidereal rate sector gear tracking mechanism. Also, I was doing planetary photography at ISO 1600 which is not generally advised but I didn't know that at the time. In any case, these are the images I came up with and frankly I haven't gotten much better in planetary photography since that time. Beginners luck, I guess.

Note the Great Red Spot and Jupiter's two inner moons on that night.

Men and women often tread where angels fear to go. I didn't know enough about the difficulty of planetary photography even in the digital age so I happily snapped away while throwing all caution to the wind. I believe the focus wasn't spot on despite adjusting it several times through the string of 75 photos. The top photo probably represents the best seeing conditions that night since it came awfully close to that "lucky shot" I've heard spoken about from time to time.

SkyMax 180mm f/15 Maksutov
Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro mount Sidereal rate only
Canon EOS 77D DSLR unmodified
1/15 exposure ISO 1600
Single-frame , no filters
6/13/2018

[Shabadoo]

Pretty cool. I unwrapped my scope and got first light in Jan 2019 and have yet to see the GRS. Figures it turned into a Small RS or went round the back.

[Don Quixote]

Very nice Henry.
I know the conditions.
I am sure there were no angels out there.

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks, Jeff. I've seen and tried to get a decent shot of the GRS maybe fives times since 6/2018. You sure would think the GRS would show up a lot more than that given the rotational speed of Jupiter in relationship to Terra's own (almost) 24 hour day. During that time I've seen three Jupiter moon shadow transits and photographed the Io shadow transit in, what, June of this year? I can't remember now. Scroll down and you'll see that one, too. In my view getting reasonably good planetary detail is about 90% dependent on excellent seeing conditions on a given night. Most of us here have excellent quality telescopes from refractors to SCTs to Maksutovs along with sound basic (and very advanced in many cases) astrophotographic skills to be able to push our equipment near its Dawes limit (if it were only true!) and control most of the variables in good astrophotography to come up with reasonably decent or even somewhat spectacularly detailed planetary images … but in the end it's absolutely all about seeing conditions for single frame astrophotography. I think at some point I'm going to do planetary and lunar video capture if skies here continue to suck seeing-wise. I've been super impressed over at the video forum about what video capture can do. Seeing is believing in our hobby. I have the capabilities of video capture but not very experienced with stakking and processing thousands of video frames at a time.

[Don Quixote]

Do I see a rabbit hole nearby?

[Hankmeister3]

"The Rabbit Hole", Marcus? Is that a new DSO or a rogue black hole passing near Jupiter that I haven't heard about? Heh!

Go ask Alice, right?

[yobbo89]

nice image!. i think i'm 4 years running and have imaged the grp once ! haha. always on the other side, i may got an edge or two of it on further dates,i actually prefer moon transitions to image and look at.