Jupiter Video

Taking pictures of anything outside of the Earth’s atmosphere is hindered by the atmosphere itself. Even if we have a perfectly clear night, we usually still have to deal with turbulence. The atmosphere is constantly moving, and even when a telescope is perfectly aligned and precisely tracking, if the “seeing” conditions are not ideal, that turbulence will cause the image to be unstable.

This video is several different short clips strung together. The telescope is tracking and is perfectly stable. The movement of Jupiter is strictly due to atmospheric disturbances. Each different clip will show a different part of the transit of Europa as it crosses the face of Jupiter over the course of about 2 1/2 hours. It crosses just above the top dark band on the left side, and looks like a tiny glowing dot. When it’s about 1/3 of the way across, staying just above the top band, you can see the glow of Europa and it’s shadow on the face of Jupiter, just to the right of the glowing dot.

2024 Total Solar Eclipse, April 8, from Corning Arkansas

My telescope has a fixed focal length, a bit too much to get the entire sun in the frame, so I had to move the telescope around to see everything.  From the initial contact of the moon with the solar disk, through the gradual movement across the sun, to the beginning of the total eclipse, the total time was about an hour and twenty minutes. I combined several clips to shorten it, and then it’s Real Time from 1:44 on the video. The shaking just as totality begins is from me taking the solar filter off of the telescope - that filter is necessary when looking at the sun, but during a total eclipse the filter can be removed, and we can finally see the Corona, the white glow beyond the sun which is only visible during a total eclipse.

  

Saturn, with 2 of it’s 82 moons, Phoebe and Iapetus - from a William Optics FLT-120, a 4.75” Refractor