A Bad Night on Jupiter!

[mikeDnight]

On Thursday 9/4/15 I had one of the worst bouts of poor seeing I've had in quite a while. Jupiter looked like it was being viewed through running water. I had to use a relatively low magnification to make any sense of the detail hidden in the image. However, with patience and pencil in hand I managed to produce a pleasing rendition of the planets cloud belts, as seen in my small scope. Its amazing that even on a really ropey night, there's fun to be had if we don't give up.

[ghostdance]

Another beautiful sketch Mike, thank you!
Can I ask what 'Antoniadi' is?
I will google, just in case it's obvious

Edit\ Just Googled Antoniadi, and it is! Should have guessed as it follows an obvious seeing code.

[paulastro]

Keep on drawing and posting them here Mike, it's great to see them!

[laudropb]

Always lovely to see a good sketch. Well done and thanks for sharing

[jnb]

Sketching is a greatly underrated skill. Not because it produces something scientifically useful but because it teaches people to look.

Keep sketching and keep posting the sketches

[mikeDnight]

Hi Ghost dance.

I see you've googled Antoniadi.

It is a very simple scale used to estimate the local seeing conditions and is measured by estimating how aggressively the stars twinkle. The scale ranges from 1, perfect, to 5, absolute rubbish. I prefer using it rather than the Pickering scale, which uses a 10 to 1 scale, as it fits in nicely with another scale, that of transparency.

In the Antoniadi scale 1 = perfect seeing, where the atmosphere is perfectly calm, allowing for superb planetary definition. The transparency scale is rated in the opposite direction. 1 being terribly poor transparency and 6 being excellent. The transparency scale referes to the limiting visual magnitude of stars near the zenith, as they appear to the naked eye. Its an important factor if our subject of study is deep sky or comets.

A night where seeing = 1 and transparency = 6 would be considered a truly perfect night. Unfortunately however, a great planetary night is rarely ever a great deep sky night, especially here in the UK.

Mike :-)

[bish]

Nice sketch. Shows that you need to stick with it when looking at the planets and not give up because the conditions don't look good

[Pete Presland]

excellent work!

[dweller25]

Hi Mike,

I was out the same evening at 21:00 with the 5" and BV's at x173 and had good seeing AII/III !!!!

Your drawing is slightly more rotated than what I saw but we saw the same details - I needed a 5" though !!

I think your eyes are better than mine

I am going to try again tonight........

[dweller25]

Mike,

Hope you don't mind - I played with your drawing......

[mikeDnight]

Hi David,

That's great! I've no computer at the moment, just a cheap tablet and am not sure how, or even if, its possible to rotate images on it before posting.

I'm glad you saw the same detail, I suspect you used your FS128 ?

I'm not sure about my eyesight being any better than yours, I think much of the credit must go to my FC 100's incredible contrast.

A friend of mine who is an excellent planetary observer and Takahashi fan, said he can't ever remember a telescope giving him such a WOW factor as the FC 100 has. He's been round several times over the last few weeks and his enthusiasm hasn't faded for the scope. I still miss my FS128 though!

Mike :-)