Jupiter and Luna, Sept. 8, 2026

This was the view around 2:18 p.m. in Spring, Texas, through my TS102SD f/11 and Canon R8.  A few minutes later, the Moon moved in front of the planet!

Moon Over Jupter, Sept. 8, 2026

I set a goal to watch the moon cover Jupiter on the afternoon of Sept. 8, 2026.  I wasn't sure whether it would be cloudy and did not want to set up an equatorial mount if it was.  So I put my 102SD f/11 on a photo tripod and alt-az mount (pretty shaky) and tried to (i) film the coverup and (ii) then watch the uncovering visually.  I found the moon in the finder and then was happily filming while the coverup happened.  Here's the video with the shakes mostly edited out.  Then the clouds moved in.  Clouds covered the emergence of Jupiter from behind the moon; they cleared about five minutes after, when I got a nice view of the planet beneath a sliver of Luna.  Canon R8.

Jupiter at 10:45 a.m. CST, Dec. 28, 2024

 

Best 1k/5k with the QHY 458C and the Spooner-Ricks 6" f/8 at f/12.

Jupiter: Double Shadow Transit (Nov. 23, 2021 or UT Nov. 24, 2021)

 

Sometimes the sun and one of Jupiter's moons line up so that the moon's shadow crosses Jupiter's face. The shadow looks like a black spot on the planet. Tonight two shadows crossed Jupiter together---a photo op! The right shadow is Ganymede's; the left is Callisto's. In between them is the Great Red Spot. To the right and below the planet, you can spot the moons themselves, Ganymede nearer Jupiter and Callisto further away.

 

This image was shot through my wonderful 6-inch f/8 Newtonian telescope with a QHY5iii485c. 5,268 subframes were taken and 60% of them stacked and sharpened to make this image. The scope is Dobson-mounted, so I dragged the scope twice to make Jupiter transit across the camera chip three times.  I'd have used the CFF290 on the NJP, but I can only see Jupiter from the north end of the yard, where I can't see the north star to set up my mount (OK, yeah, without drift-aligning, but we all have our limits).

Jupiter at 3:31-39 UT, May 6, 2017

It's been a while since I tried this, but planetary imaging is kind of fun even though I'm not that good at it yet.  I thought the seeing would be better tonight, but the air did not settle until after midnight, when Jupiter was behind the trees.  This image is 40% of its original size, as a result.  It is 10,000 of 20,000 frames with the ZWO224MC camera through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/33.75 (TV 2.5x Powermate).

Jupiter & Venus Alignment - June 30, 2015

Jupiter was very close to Venus tonight.  This is the view through the SV110ED with the Canon T3i and AT2FF.  It rained this evening where I live, so I drove about thirty miles north to find a hole in the clouds.  Anyway, the best view is one you don't see here.  It was at 77x through a 10mm eyepiece.  In that view, Jupiter's cloudbands shone, and all four moons were points of light.  Venus was an amazing crescent on the other side.  So I could actually observe six solar system bodies in a single view.  Pretty amazing!