Hercules and Atlas

Stepping up to the images captured using the 2x Barlow we have Hercules and Atlas, two craters towards the northeast limb that have featured previously here. The higher magnification images take much longer to process but, in this case, the end result is pleasing:


Hercules is the crater to the left (69km in diameter), Atlas to the right (87km in diameter). Inside Hercules is the satellite crater Hercules G. Moving northeast from Atlas we encounter Atlas E, Atlas F and Keldysh.

Janssen

Back to the Moon again for this post, in particular the rugged highlands towards the southeastern limb. The crater Janssen, named after the French astronomer who co-discovered helium, is the largest in this picture but not the most prominent. It is an ancient crater and contains many other smaller craters within its walls, such as the more distinctive Fabricus.


A relatively crisp image and with a lot of features to be labelled:

Jupiter's Galilean Moons

Four of Jupiter's inner-most satellites - the Galilean moons - are very easy to spot and their relatively short orbital periods make them entertaining to watch as they change position, eclipse each other and disappear and reappear from behind Jupiter itself. However they don't show up on the webcam videos unless they are over-exposed in which case Jupiter becomes a big blur. Hence a bit of artistic licence...


Here we have am over-exposed image of the moons overlaid on a processed image of Jupiter! From left to right we have Ganymede (the largest moon in the Solar System and even bigger than Mercury), Callisto (third largest in Solar System after Saturn's moon Titan) and Europa (sixth largest in the Solar System). Io (fourth largest in Solar System) is behind Jupiter so not visible. In case you were wondering, our moon is the fifth largest moon in the Solar System so sits between Io and Europa in size.

Revisiting Mare Crisium

Jupiter wasn't the only target on my list a couple of nights ago and, with the Moon in a similar phase to my last webcam session, I revisited a few recent destinations.

First of all we have Mare Crisium and Proclus which were most recently featured here so I won't include any more details.


I'm quite pleased with this one since it's much sharper than my previous attempt. I also took some higher magnification videos of Proclus which I'll upload once I've found time to process them.

Jupiter

Considering how much time I spend looking at it I was a little surprised when I realised that I have yet to post a picture of Jupiter. Last night was relatively still and clear and with Jupiter fairly favourably positioned it sat at the top of my list of targets. Usually I stay at the eyepiece when observing Jupiter, there's just so much to look at - distinguishing the different belts and zones, watching the progress of the moons - but this time I used the webcam.

I haven't practised much on Jupiter with the webcam so I'm still trying out different filters and settings. It's a similar process to that which I went through when observing Mars and so far I haven't cracked it when using the 2x Barlow. Here's the best of the bunch from last night:


The main equatorial belts are clear and zooming in a little makes it possible to pick out the Great Red Spot on the South Equatorial Belt (towards the right edge):


All in all, not a bad attempt but I expect something much better once I've had a bit more practice.