An All-Nighter with Jove

I always look forward to Jupiter oppositions in the winter zodiac. The current apparition has the giant planet hosted among the stars of Gemini, riding about as high as possible in the night sky for mid‑northern observers. The combination of it gliding above the worst of the turbulent atmospheric and long January nights (where in theory you might capture an entire rotation in a single session) are exciting prospects.

But winter is winter - especially in the Baltimore area. The cold is one thing to contend with, but even more of a spoiler are the clouds and unstable seeing. I’ve often felt that our region’s winter skies offer fewer usable nights than any other season, and it turns out that impression isn’t just grumbling. According to long‑term climatology, the region’s winter sky is overcast or mostly cloudy about half the time. And while I cannot find data on “seeing” I would bet we get most clear nights checking in at a 1-2 seeing level on the scale of 1-10.

Which is why the night of January 7–8, 2026 felt like such a small miracle.

The forecast from Astrospheric earlier that day told the usual winter story: cloud cover and seeing models leaning pessimistic, barely reaching “acceptable” levels. The kind of forecast that normally has me planning a short session – an hour, maybe ninety minutes – before the clouds roll in or the seeing collapses (or the cold gets the best of me). But heck, why not roll the dice? After all, Jupiter was a couple days from opposition, so prime time.

When I stepped outside around 8:30 PM, the first surprise was the temperature. It wasn’t bitterly cold, which meant I could stay chair‑side instead of retreating indoors between captures. I’d already set the scope out earlier to cool so I started my “pre-flight checklist”

• Confirm the spotting scope alignment
• Dial in a very solid collimation
• Check transparency (a respectable 7–8 by my estimate)
• Gauge the seeing (somewhere between 3 and 5, with brief moments of better steadiness)

With the QHY camera running through SharpCap, I was getting a very respectable 130+ fps in white light. I began a cadence of four‑run sequences every 15–20 minutes, each run a two‑minute capture. Europa was approaching the disk, with a transit predicted just after midnight – another incentive to keep going as long as the sky allowed.

And, surprisingly, the sky did cooperate. As I wrapped up each imaging run I was like a gambler pushing his luck, thinking “just one more capture before you call it quits”. Before I knew it, it was midnight and I had seen about half a Jupiter rotation at this point. Now my appetite was whetted for that elusive full rotation capture. I did some quick calculations in my head and figured I’d have to hang in there until close to 4 a.m. in order to see the GRS, which had started off setting, come back into view. I decided to go for it and did a meridian flip to ensure I could track the giant planet as it headed west in the sky.

I continued performing imaging captures but now roughly every 30-60 minutes, retreating inside between them not so much to warm up but to put my feet up and get a little rest. The days of staying up all night and at my scope may well be behind me!

By 3 a.m. I could see that some patchy clouds were finally working their way into my region, dropping the transparency a bit. About an hour later the Moon showed a bit of a halo around it, further evidence of deteriorating conditions. And while that sort of haze is not always a killer for seeing, in this instance I could see that it, too, was slipping as the early morning wore on. I took the final sequence at from 4:15–4:30 a.m. with the seeing slipping down to about a 3. But I had it – there was the GRS rising into view signaling I had seen the full planet’s cloud features pass in front of me.  

Despite the uneven seeing in the early morning hours, the dataset was strong enough to build a full cylindrical map in WinJUPOS. The region around the GRS is a little darker than ideal, but that’s simply the geometry of the night: I never caught it near the central meridian, so the limb‑darkened frames had to carry that section. Still, the map is a personal accomplishment that captures the character of Jupiter beautifully for that date, revealing many long-term features such as the GRS, Oval BA, the SSTB storms, and many others!

Yes, nights like that are rare in January. The forecasts don’t encourage you. The statistics don’t encourage you. And yet, every so often, the sky relents just enough to reward persistence. My reward on this night was a nearly full rotation, a Europa transit, some enjoyable visual observing of the planet between imaging runs, and a cool map documenting Jupiter as it came to opposition in 2026. Yep - if this is how my 2026 observing is going to go, I’ll take it!