Saturday evening was my 12th imaging session of the year… and cold enough that my sinuses were not happy this morning!
Last night was a special event.. the moon Callisto eclipsed by Jupiter and it came out from behind Jupiter at approx 00:27UTC. Jupiter is now about 37 arcseconds in diameter.
Standard equipment: skywatcher AZ-EQ6GT mount, Celestron C9.25 schmidt cass OTA, x1.5 barlow, moonlight remote focuser, UV/IR cut filter, ZWO ASI 585MC camera. A front plate heater and a short dew shield are also part of the setup.
Tracking continues to be an issue, with 3 or 4 manual corrections needed each 120sec run. The ROI and cutout field of view is approx 60-70 arcseconds square.
Seeing was poor 2/10, transparency was poor 3/10. Jupiter was61 degrees altitude but its azimuth is already 220degrees and getting worse.. closer to the sun. It was actually still in dusk when I started the imaging session. Temps were a little cool, around +1C with a slight wind and no moon.
I have experimentally added my first line annotations, pointing out Callisto.
This was the best 5% of 13K frames at 4ms each. Interestingly, something happened in the middle of the session that affected one imaging run (120 sec with a 60 sec pause between each). I have attached the results of that as well. My best guess is an aircraft contrail, as there were not a lot of clouds in the sky at the time. Additionally the swamp peeper frogs were out loudly proclaiming their presence, as was some coyotes in the distance.