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

__________________
Chance favors the prepared mind.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Dave Mitsky--

Live on the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan and we usually have nothing but
clouds from November thru April.

I'm going to try to pick it up on the Internet, but I'm not very good at pushing
these damn buttons. Most of the time I just use the Off Switch.

I don't use digital, but was a very good film persom. Got hundreds of slides
so now all I have to do is transfer to CD. (when I learn how)

Want to get in touch with me << starckr@juno.com >>

Bill <]:-)

I made a valiant attempt to view the triple transit from my backyard, but not being an experienced observer, I am not quite sure what I finally got.... :blink:

Rather than view the event through the eyepiece I chose to view Jupiter using a modified security cam connected to a TV monitor, (instead of an eyepiece) but with a 2x Barlow on my 5 inch reflector.

I had to stop it all the way down to see any details, including the cloud bands and the moons. The original plan was to videotape this if it looked halfway decent but I decided it wasn't worth the effort.

Anyway Sunday night around 8pm AEST, I observed three moons, two very very close to Jupiter-Ganymede and Io (I think!), Callisto some way off and one shadow quite noticeably transiting across Jupiter.

Maybe I should have gone and observed the triple transit with someone who knew what they were doing and with better equipment...Oh well, never mind, it's only another 41 years before this event repeats :P