Viewing Planets - 14 March 2015

Click for the time-lapse view of Callisto's transit on YouTube. Be sure to watch it at high resolution and full-screen.

At right is a cropped view of Jupiter with Callisto visible as the small dark dot near the center of Jupiter. Europa is the closest moon to the right, and Io is farthest away to the right. Ganymede was far to the left, outside of this cropped view (but visible in the time-lapse video). Earlier, Europa's shadow crossed Jupiter.

The decision to try and get a time-lapse view of the transit was a spur-of-the-moment one so I rushed to assemble the setup and begin shooting for fear of losing the window of decent seeing.

I ended up staying with the 6" AstroPhysics refractor and extending the focal length to ~4000mm by use of a 2x barlow (Televue) and 2x teleconverter adapter for my Nikon D600. The time-lapse covers a little more than 2-1/2 hours and goes to the end of the transit. The resulting view is a crop of the full frame.

Technical details:

Camera: Nikon D600
Scope: AstroPhysics AP155 f/7 with 2x Televue Big Barlow + Nikon 2x teleconverter
Exposure: 1/160 sec. @ ISO 1600, 15 sec. interval
Mount: Losmandy Titan
Guider: none