Jupiter - Like you've never seen it before - Part Three!

Just when I thought I had posted an awesome image of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft, along comes this video (made up of multiple stills) of Juno's orbit around the poles of the planet.  This is absolutely fantastic. Never before have we seen the poles in such detail. And when the spacecraft gets to Perijove (closest point to Jupiter), it just knocks your socks off (at least I am currently barefoot!!)
And the music picked - perfect (extra points if you know the movie it came from).
Click the link below - you won't regret it.

Juno at Perijove

Jupiter - Like you've never seen it before! (Part two)

NASA’s Juno spacecraft was racing away from Jupiter following its seventh close pass of the planet when JunoCam snapped this image on May 19, 2017, from about 29,100 miles (46,900 kilometers) above the cloud tops. The spacecraft was over 65.9 degrees south latitude, with a lovely view of the south polar region of the planet.

You really need to head over to Nasa.gov to see the latest hi-res images from the Juno spacecraft!!

Jupiter - Three moons and Two shadows

Wow.  This year has really been awful as far as clear skies on moonless nights is concerned.  Hard to get any decent deep space imaging done under these conditions.

So I decided to see what's up in the lunar and planetary domain. Playing around with Starry Night Pro, the planetarium software I use to select and point my telescope to objects I want to image, I noticed an interesting configuration of Jupiter's moons on the night of June 3rd. Three of the brightest moons will be close to the planet, IO will transit the face of the planet and both IO and Ganymede would cast shadows on the planet surface - all during a few hours on the 3rd.

Checking the calendar I saw that the 3rd was a Saturday. Oh boy, a weekend night, I could stay up and not worry about work the next morning. And it turned out to be a clear night to boot.

So out came the telescope and imaging equipment. And although the atmospheric seeing was terrible (the images of Jupiter were boiling and roiling like crazy - not a good night for detailed planetary imaging) the event was interesting enough to make a go of it.

Jupiter and its Moons - June 3, 2017
EdgeHD11 - ASI120MC Planetary Camera
FL = 7200mm - Approx 1000 frames stacked

So here is the result - a mosaic of four images showing the progression of the three moons about Jupiter.  Clockwise from the top left: 10:30 PM, 10:44 PM, 11:12 PM, 11:17 PM. IO closest to the planet; IO's shadow to the left; Ganymede top right with it's shadow top center of planet; Callisto bottom right. You can see IO transiting the planet and just about ready to exit in the third image of this group. Seeing was so bad I could not capture IO's complete transit against Jupiter.