Jupiter

Some shots of Jupiter. Antonio wanted to discard them due to bad seeing, but I think they are quite acceptable!

Jupiter's rotation, taking into account its big size (more than 10 times bigger than Earth) is surprisingly high. Concretely it completes a whole rotation every 9 hours and 50 minutes (approximately). That means that in a complete night observation session one could see all its surface.

Moreover, we could take a picture of it every few minutes and use them to produce a video of its rotation. Last week we travelled to Olvera, a nice town in the Cádiz mountains (south of Spain) and we carried our equipment with us to try to record the rotation of the giant planet.

¡UPDATE!: The Jupiter photo in this page has been awarded with the first prize in the Astrophotography Contest of the XIX Spanish Astronomy Conference. 

Checking Internet one realizes that one of the most common ambitions of any amateur astronomer is to have an observatory. A place where you can easily observe without the hassles of mounting, connecting wires, adjusting your alignment in every observing session. In fact we are pretty sure that the best observatory is not the one with the best sky, less light pollution and best seeing but the one which you can use more often. Professional observatories don't choose their location in places with better sky but in places where the sky is good the maximum number of nights. Nights with good seeing conditions are almost everywhere and the important thing is to be there even if it is not a weekend or holidays.

From the beginning of the “La Azotea” project of making astronomy from a urban environment we have tried different places: Granada, Armilla and currently Churriana de la Vega in an attic oriented to the East. After some observation sessions we have noticed that Vega de Granada (a flat area near Granada, where Churriana is located) even having quite heavy light pollution presents some quite good seeing nights.

¡UPDATE!: The Moon mosaic in this page has been awarded with the first prize in the Astrophotography Contest of the XIX Spanish Astronomy Conference.

After some months without taking out the 25 Obsession Telescope, we go up to the observation place called “Dornajo” in order to take some shot of Jupiter trough the webcam. The operation began at 5 in the afternoon picking up the whole necessary material distributed in several places. 

After several hours, we had the 25 inches telescope mounted above the equatorial platform and polar aligned. It began what seemed a fantastic, windless and clear night. Some time later Javier Algarra arrived and also mounted their impressive Taka. While we spoke about the new astronomical gadget a bank of fog didn't allow us to see anything in the sky. The humidity also at this time overtook the saturation level soaking the whole material. After a half hour, the sky cleared up and we could begin with the planet Jupiter. 

The seeing was not bad but the wind blew in gusts that made very difficult to maintain the planet inside the small ccd of the webcam. Some hours later the moon rose over the horizon and we waited to a better position close to the zenith to tray a mosaic of its surface. In order to get that we used the QHY5 CCD, but once again, the wind hinders us vastly and prevents us taking some quality videos and it didn't give us time to cover the whole surface. In spite of it, a good frame selection, the use of the appropriate software (including our new ManualFrameAlignment) and many processing hours, allowed us to obtain these results:

Remark: Even though we could have incremented the contrast in the Jupiter image, we have tried to obtain a result as close as what we really saw that night through the telescope's eyepiece.

Some additional of Jupiter and Moon takes from last Sunday. Seeing was much better than in previous attempts and we tried to use two barlow lenses (3x and 2x) together. Click them to watch them at full resolution:

Last Friday, after the S.A.G. meeting we tried to photograph Jupiter from La Azotea. Sky conditions were terrible. The results can be improved, but it is a good start. In the first photograph we didn't obtain good enough focus. In the second one focus is better, but some artifacts appear due to some spots and dirt on the CCD. The third one is a new attempt to reprocess the image using the last version of Registax and using supersampling. We think we have improved it a lot removing almost all the previous noise.

We have added a video to show a small clip of the original raw video that we used. It can be noticed that seeing was quite bad. The original video had around 4700 frames of which 2700 had to be discarded due to bad quality (and a cloud that passed by). In the video you can see some of the GOOD frames that we used. Note that Youtube has added some compression artifacts (squares) that are not visible in the original video.

After several bad weather days, and what it is much worse, loads and loads of work (congresses, end of the academic year...) the Friday evening look promising to go out and enjoy the sky. Both Antonio and myself wanted to go for a visual observation session in Sierra Nevada for a long time. La Azotea is a great place to learn astrophotography, but for visual observations it has lots of drawbacks.

The evening was quite complicated because I had to go to Cullar Vega to finish the preparations for the photography exposition Cosmos: Vistas desde la Nave Tierra of the S.A.G.. It took more time that we initially planned and we finished it  at 8PM. After that I went to Armilla where we loaded Antonio's Pequeñín in the van. Around 10PM we went to Granada to pick up more gadgets, supplies and, of course, some additional winter clothes. Finally, we began our trip to Sierra Nevada around 11PM.

The night of Saturday March 14th, was again very good for astronomy. After the set up of all the devices, and done a precise alignment to the Polar star, the main goal for this night was the Orion nebula through the refrigerated QHY6 CCD, besides other type of objects as galaxies. The humidity oscillated in the whole night around 50 - 60% and the temperature was about 10 grades which was very bearable.