And finally.. after 44 days of cloudy skies and or frigid temperatures, the skies cleared on 2026 January 8th and this was the first imaging session from the Serenity Observatory at SCGO.
This is Jupiter, just a few days shy of opposition. It was low in the sky during the clear skies portion of the evening, only 33 degrees of altitude up, hence some of the atmospheric dispersion going on, blue on the upper right and red on the lower left.
This was the best 5% of 22K frames, each of 4ms in duration. Jupiter is a whopping 46.5 arcseconds across. Seeing was poor, transparency was poor.
The telescope and mount behaved well after not being powered up in almost two month.
All in all it was great to get back outside.. lets hope for some more Clear Skies!
