Observing Jupiter – 10th November 2023

We are about a week past opposition with Jupiter and was my first opportunity of this season to get out and check out Jupiter. Whilst Jupiter has been prominent in the sky some some time it was obscured by my neighbours house and the weather in Sydney hasn’t been kind this spring.

After checking the MetroBlue Astronomy Seeing for Sydney earlier in the day I could see that it would be an excellent opportunity to get some observing done. I first started with Saturn as it is high in the sky mid/late evening with Jupiter getting into a better position from about 11pm.

After performing a quick stack I could see the results were going to be pretty good so I decided to do about 90 minutes of observing taking 60 seconds of video followed by 30 seconds delay.

The following animation below is the result and am quite pleased even though the clarity of the image softens towards the end as I hadn’t turned on my dew heaters and only noticed when I was packing up.

You can clearly see Jovian moon Io and it’s shadow transits the face of Jupiter. A beautiful site.

Jupiter and Venus Conjunction – 2nd March 2023

Every now and again the positions of the planets in the night sky appear to align themselves, but in reality it is just their orbits in the ecliptic plane around the sun. And this time we were treated with two of the brightest planets, Jupiter and Venus.

I was very pleased with how this photo turned out. The planets were both low in the western sky along, Jupiter top left with it’s moons out to the right hand side. Venus shining brightly in the lower left.

Observing Jupiter – 8th November 2022

Certainly had one of my best evenings observing Jupiter. Starting at about 9pm the visibility in the sky was quite amazing and i knew that I had to make the most of it. The image below turned out to be the first image that I was able capture. One of Jupiter’s moons is out to the right and projecting a shadow onto the surface..

Combining a stacked and processed image I was able to create the following video.