Observing Log for Mike Durkin


11/29-30/2024 about 9:00PM-1:30AM
Locust Valley, NY
Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 3/5
Temperature: 30-45 degrees
Equipment: Celestron Ultima 8 with PEC and ZWO 174 MM mini

Take some RGB videos of Jupiter and Mars, which I will stack later. However I did notice that there were a lot of dust donuts, so I need to see where I have to clean something. I also had to periodically transfer the video files from the ASI Air to a thumbdrive so transfer and keep enougyh free space.
Other notes, for Jupter I did get to see the Great Red Spot come into view. However I did not stay up long enough to see one of the moon's shadow on Jupiter. For Mars, it seemed to be about a 80% gibbous phase and I am not too confident on the focus since I could not see any surface features.

jupiter-rgb-20241129-221500-crop jupiter-rgb-20241129-223008-crop
jupiter-rgb-20241129-225236-crop jupiter-rgb-20241129-230948-crop
jupiter-rgb-20241129-232840-crop jupiter-rgb-20241129-235203-crop
jupiter-rgb-20241130-000441-crop jupiter-animation-20241129
Date: 11/29/2024
Long Island, NY
Temperature: 30-45 degrees
Equipment: Celestron Ultima 8 with PEC and ASI174MM Mini (mono).
Obtained with an ASIAir and processed with AutoStakkert 3.1.4 and Registax 6, then combined in GIMP

Looking at the images with the moon Io, I can see a faint "donut", so my focus was probably off by a little bit
The animation is a collection of 7 frames, each frame made with separate 30s RGB images.

mars-20241130-002824-1

After that, I looked at both planets visually. Started with Mars, and just like with the video display, I could not see any surface features. Then looked at Jupiter and I could still see the GRS. I played around with a couple of color filters to see if it would help the contrast for the GRS, but it didn't help me too much.


11/29/2024 about 12:00AM-2:00AM
Locust Valley, NY
Transparency: 10/10, Seeing 4/5
Temperature: 35-45 degrees
Equipment: Hutech modified Canon T3i

Thanksgiving night.
DSLR Photometry of γ Cas, κ Cas, ρ Cas, and ε Aur.
I also wanted to measure X Per, but my camera's focus shifted a bit so some of my shots had saturated stars.
Visual measurement of α Ori.
Also saw Mars with the naked eye, first sighting of the season.




Other Log Entries
<-- 2023 Jan  Feb  Mar  Apr  May  Jun  Jul  Aug  Sep  Oct  Nov   Dec  2025 -->