This morning, 7th May local time, I had reasonably good seeing for about an hour – long enough to capture 7 runs of Jupiter with the Galilean Moon Io and its shadow transiting across the Jovian disc.

The red channel was pretty good in almost all images, but unfortunately the blue channel was pretty ordinary, bringing down most of the images from what they could’ve been. Still, I can’t complain as the last few days have seen some better than average conditions, allowing me to finally start getting some runs on the board with this Jupiter season.

The best two images from the session are shown here, as well as a 7-frame animation of the red channel showing Jupiter rotating and Io and its shadow in transit.

Jupiter, Oval BA, Io and its shadow

Oval BA is definitely fainter than last year, but still has an orange ring with a lighter/white centre. As Anthony Wesley pointed out in his beautiful image, there’s another white storm which appears to have an orange ring around it just to the right of Oval BA, and in-between the two there’s a dark spot. It will be interesting to see what happens to this trio over the next few weeks.

Continue reading to see the animation and the second image, and to read more about the capture and processing of the images and animation.

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