The skies have remained clear for the past several days. In addition, Jupiter is now a late night object that clears my treeline by 2300(L). Combined, this has allowed me to pick back up supporting NASA’s JunoCam project. On the 15th/16th I was able to image Jupiter and then Saturn. I had to stay up later than I usually do since Saturn is rising much later than Jupiter. It is also lower in the sky as well.
|
|
It looks like I will be able to continue taking images of Jupiter until the scheduled end-of-mission for the Juno program. It is possible that NASA will extend the mission if the instrumentation hasn’t succumbed to the planets extreme radiation fields. If not, the Juno spacecraft will be intentionally plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere sometime in July to prevent any inadvertent earthly contamination of Jupiter’s moons.
Speaking of Jupiter’s moons, images on the 19th showed the 4 Galilean moons all on one side of the planet so I took an image with a wider field of view. I had to overexpose Jupiter and stretch the image a good bit to make it easier to see the moon Callisto.