A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Tonight the sky was nothing much for observing Jupiter, but I gave it a try nonetheless. Not-so-thin clouds around, bad seeing (turbulence in the atmosphere), compounded by my laziness in collimating the optics and a mirror that did not want to cool down…

I set out to look at Jupiter at 10PM, and observed for an hour. I followed the transit at the central meridian of the great red spot, and saw a few more details on the disk. Since the clouds were coming and going, I had time to rush inside every five minutes or so to sketch what I was observing on a piece of paper. I also took a picture with a hand-held camera…

So here are the results of my efforts tonight. The sketch shows what I saw on the disk. Of interest are two vortices just west of the great red spot (GRS, the big eye on the top center), the interruption of the black "eyelid", the three festoons, the white spot south of the GRS on the STB (the south tropical band, the one running above the GRS in the drawing). Also interesting the white filling of the NEB (the lower, thick band from which the festoons generate).

And here is the pic – of course, not much detail in it, but one sees the GRS and some banding:

Now for what really made me happy tonight. I later checked Jupiter's appearance in recent pictures, and found one taken five days ago by a japanese amateur, a guy named Hatanaka, in a site of Jovian observers (http://www.kk-system.co.jp/Alpo/Latest/Jupiter.htm ): here is it.

This is a stack of about 400 images, and shows lots of detail. But the interesting thing is that one can see many of the features I drew on my sketch above… This makes me happy, for I see I did not make them up!