ISS and Jupiter 04-12-2009

A few quick images from today.

There were two good ISS passes today – one in the early morning, and one in the early evening. The images here are from the morning pass. The sky was still too bright for me to focus the telescope during the evening pass, so I just tracked it visually through the eyepiece. The station is awesome to track visually! The ISS images are a tad on the dark side … it has been so long since I’ve done this that I forgot the exposure settings and had to guess on the fly!

The Jupiter image is just a quick one from the evening. I noticed that there was a shadow transit, so I thought I’d set up and try for an image or two. I didn’t really set up my EQ mount properly though and the seeing wasn’t terribly fantastic, so I ended up only grabbing a few quick, relatively low magnification AVIs. The shadow was caused by Callisto (which was off to the left, I didn’t manage to catch it in this image). The moons are, from left to right, Europa, Io and Ganymede.

For these images I used my 10” Newtonian telescope. For the ISS shots I hand tracked the station through the finderscope with the telescope on a Dobsonian mount. For the Jupiter image, I used an EQ6 mount. I used a DMK21AU04.AS to image capture. The Jupiter image was processed using Registax 4.