An Oppositionless Year

Rather hard to believe that there are only a few days left in 2013 - a year in which Jupiter never reaches opposition. But such years are grand for us northern hemisphere observers because the king of the planets rides high in Gemini these evenings, ascending beyond the murky atmosphere into cold winter skies. While observing in temps at or below freezing is something I grow less fond of each year it is still worth pursuing to catch Jupiter in this prime time (just no wind please!)

Even though I had set the scope out to chill about 30 minutes ahead of time the seeing still started off pretty wretched - boiling almost to the point of smearing the nearby Galilean satellites into invisibility. But the good thing of this session was that I somehow managed to set the tripod down in a really fine alignment with the pole - tracking was really awesome, keeping old Jove centered for minutes at a time.

As often happens after a half hour or so the seeing began to steady and I became a little more confident of the focus - especially when I began to pick up on Ganymede's shadow transit which started at about 9 p.m. local time. Ganymede always presents a large shadow and is less common than Io transits so it felt good to capture this (so for this apparition I have a Callisto transit and a Ganymede). Not a lot of belt activity seen, but clearly the SEB is back and fully recovered from its swoon. And yet again, I am amazed at the detail that can be captured with a simple 6" reflector.

With the tracking doing so well I couldn't resist giving the Orion Nebula a shot. Now clearly, while a videography approach works well on planets there's a lot to be desired for anything deep sky. I pulled the Barlow and set the exposure to two seconds at about 3 frames per second and let it run for a couple of minutes. Standard stacking in Registax 6 and some playing with the wavelet filters and - voila - a reasonable facsimile of the winter showpiece.

Here's hoping for more clear skies in January as Jupiter comes to opposition, and the will power I'll need to take advantage of them!