Jupiter Photo Opportunity - Update

Blogged by Jonathan Maron on December 27, 2007 and tagged with Press, Jupiter, Sun.

Following up from the recent blog post, Shevill Mathers has just updated me:

This was a mid morning event with the sun high in the sky with the sun visible during breaks in the low level cumulus. Unfortunately, our 'monsoonal' weather pattern and high level cirrus this month defeated us. There was too much light scatter in the upper atmosphere, which expanded the solar disc just a minute fraction beyond the occulting cone. The sun itself was very quiet, a few small prominences were seen but definition was not the best with poor seeing conditions. This was maybe just enough to obscure the much fainter Jupiter.

All the equipment worked as planned, so technically, had the sky conditions been OK, we would have captured Jupiter maybe 1/2 degree away from the solar disc on the afternoon of the 22nd, and watched it being occulted mid morning on the 23rd.

Keep your head up, Shevill! :-)

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