Early Saturday night I had good views of Jupiter's Great Red Spot transit through the Astronomical Society of Harrisburg's 12.5" f/6.5 Cave Newtonian and the 17" f/15 classical Cassegrain. What might have been a dark barge was visible as well.

By the time that Callisto's shadow ingressed on the disk of Juiter the seeing had taken a definite turn for the worst. When Io joined the party two shadows were visible but by the time of the rare triple shadow transit (3:00 UT) the seeing was so bad (the worst that I've experienced in many months) that it was not possible to discern Callisto's shadow in the north polar region despite stopping down both scopes to as little as 6 inches. We could make out the shadows of Io and Ganymede with some effort.

So it was 2 out of 3 (the shadows of Callisto and Io and Io and Ganymede) two times.

Efforts to image the event through the 17" with a Meade LPI device were not very successful.

Other objects observed with the 12.5 and 17" included Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Saturn, Titan, M65, M66, M104, and the famous variable star R Leonis. Several eighth and ninth magnitude stars in Taurus were occulted by the Moon during the early part of the night. I also viewed the Moon and Jupiter with the new ASH 127mm f/12.1 Orion StarMax Maksutov-Cassegrain.

Dave Mitsky

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Chance favors the prepared mind.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
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