Finally managed to have another shot at Jupiter through the hectic work schedule and festive gatherings! Shot this data through thin cirrus clouds and under mediocre seeing conditions. The results are not to my liking but they are results and I cannot afford to discard them! It's quite interesting to see how the SEB has evolved since November. Jupiter surely looks more familiar now!

Its coming!

 A solar eclipse is one of Natures recurring phenomena, not exactly rare as it happens somewhere in the world at least twice every year but never the less beautiful because, seen from the right perspective, it reminds us that we live in a universe of rotating spheres that go about their cosmic lives twirling around themselves and each other in a randomly precise dance.

So what exactly are eclipses anyway? Well...to put it simply, an eclipse occurs when one object passes in front of another partially or totally obscuring (hiding) it for a period of time. We have Solar eclipses which happen when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth and Lunar eclipses which happen when the Earth gets between the Sun and the Moon, casting a shadow on the latter. Still with me? ...good! So what's gonna happen on January 4? Well, for a few hours the Moon will be seen passing in front of the Sun and hiding around 50% of it in the process! The eclipse begins around 09:00 Local Time, maximum eclipse happens at 10:40 and the whole event ends shortly after 12:00. Below is a timetable centered on Nicosia with times and other data for eclipse day. I will return to the subject with another post on how to observe the eclipse, what to look out for and other useful info!

Did this in Movie Maker. Combined 132 shots (downsized of course) and put them together in MM to give a feel of what was going on last night.

What a storm we had last night! As soon as I got off from work at 19:00 and saw the flashes illuminating the sky I knew I had to rush home and set up the camera with the hope of catching some lightning! Well, nature was good to me! I shot more than 150 shots and almost all of them have lightnings in them! Enough to compose a short animation I guess!

Here are the most "photogenic" of them! :) 

Bright as always and surprisingly large on the chip. Interesting phase too!

The alarm went off at 02:45 UT. 20 minutes later I was behind the C9,25 (which spent the night outside ready for early morning action!) and Saturn was coming into focus on the CCD chip. Quite a sight! Last time I imaged this guy, the rings were seen edge-on. Not quite the way we are used to seeing Saturn. This time though, the story is very different. The weather was variable throughout the morning, at times it was almost overcast and I was shooting through holes in the clouds! Seeing was mostly fair with times of good. I shot 12 avi's (1800 frames each) but I experimented with the frame rate (5/10fps) to see what works best as the planet is still very dim! ...here's a rough shot from the data!

...of the SEB outbreak region, can be seen in this preview images I prepared from the data set I just acquired. It is visible in the lower right edge of Jupiter as a streak of dark material cluttering to the right. Hopefully I will be able to have all the data processed tomorrow so I can post updates!

...so here's a view of Jupiter from November 20 showing the SEB outbreak region and how it had developed at that time. It has since grown in size considerably! Conditions for this shot were less than ideal both technically as well as meteorologically! Never the less, given the importance of the image, it goes in the Gallery!