On frosty morning of February, 6th I have been waiting for Moon and Jupiter to climb higher in the sky. Around 6 am Moon has already been quite high, and also Jupiter reached its highest position near meridian, however its altitude was mere 20 degrees above horizon. It is hard to expect any decent seeing conditions so low in the sky, but nevertheless I decided to catch this giant planet for the first time in 2018.
It was pretty cold, so i did not played with changing to camera with barlow, but imaged both Jupiter and Moon with my deep sky setup – that is Meade ACF 10″ with telecompressor and QHY163M camera. I used green filter for both images. So here is the Jupiter, stack of few dozens single frames. You can see two pale dots at both planete sides – these are Io and Ganymede. Great Red Spot is clearly visible (click on the image to enlarge).
And then I immediately pointed telescope to the Moon. Image below is two panels mosaic made with the same setup and green filter as well. At this moment Moon was about 386,000km away.
Large version here https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2018-02-06-MOON.jpg
Clear skies!
