Conditions were far worse than expected for Friday night viewing.

I took a nap and overslept. I woke up and found out my voicemail on my phone was full. I left my phone in another room as well so I didn't hear it when I was napping. I left my house around 10pm and found both Tim's and a new Faac member at HJRO. The sky was mostly cloudy with winds and haze not helping the views. They were looking at Jupiter. It seemed the clouds were clearing a bit, but we had somewhat poor seeing with no real improvement over a 25mm plossl with any higher powered eyepiece, when using the c14. Also the view may have even improved a bit using a lower powered 32mm eyepiece. So seeing conditions were fairly poor. Or perhaps I should say details delivered were poor. The seeing wasn't good, but the movement, from seeing wasn't as extreme as I've seen on some really bad nights with high winds.

I saw much better views of Jupiter in sky conditions a few days earlier in the week. If the seeing is bad we can still try to take an image or AVI movie of a planet and try to process that collection of stills and create a decent photo.

I tried this and used backyard EOS to capture some AVI movie files.

Here is one of the photos I processed of Jupiter below. This image is not very good. It looks a bit better than what we were seeing most of the time at the eyepiece, but it's not nearly as good as I hoped it would have been.

I would have taken a much better image of Jupiter at the end of the science night session earlier last week, when seeing was excellent, but I didn't have a camera with me at that time.

If you double click the image below you'll see a larger image in your browser.

Mars looked much better than I expected it would look. Mars is near opposition right now, which means it's giving great views through nice high powered telescopes. . . If you get a chance to see Mars, now is a good time to see it.





I'll post a photo of Mars in my next blog entry.

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