Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

The skies cleared unexpectedly Monday evening, with clouds all around and threatening to move in, So I bounced outside to open the observatory and start a quick imaging run. That turned into 80 minutes of images across 30 runs.
The observatory can be opened and an imaging run started in under 2 minutes now. Very good for targets of opportunity.
The LX200GPS handpaddle (2003) continues to come indoors when not in use to stay warm and has been working much better.
The shorter dew shield is working, keeping the dew off the optics as well as when it was another 2″ longer.
The dew heater strap on the corrector plate is still working well. I’ve ramped down to about 50% duty cycle on a regular night.

Jupiter was extremely low to the horizon, starting at 27 deg altitude) and seeing was much worse than poor. The session ended at about 39 degrees. Exposures started at 100ms, much higher than the normal zenith 35ms. A lot of atmospheric extinction going on there. By the end of the 80 minute run, exposures had to be dropped down to 70ms.
These images were produced from the best 25% of the frame, each about 1000-1500 frames originally.

The big surprise! Karma! Payback! was the unexpected double moon transit or Europa (on the right) and Io (on the left).
I was totally unaware of this event, concentrating instead more on the shadow transits, which for our location tend to occur during daytime working hours.

The remote control using handyavi telescope interface worked well with 3 or 4 exceptions. The telescope would run away from the target in slow motion and I would have to abort the imaging and recenter Jupiter. Not sure why this is happening, but being indoors beats the heck out of sitting outside in the cold for 2 hours.