No GRS but Io is in transit ....

[John]

A quick heads up for anyone out. Jupiter's sulpherous moon Io has started to transit the disk. Io's shadow is very clear but Io itself much harder to see against Jupiters cloud tops.

Factoid: Apparently Io has the least water content of any astronomical object in the solar system. I'm therefore crossing it off my potential angling venue list

[Stu]

Enjoy John, cloudy here  

Just checked SkySafari; you can tell we are near opposition by how close Io is to its shadow, can't you?

[Timebandit]

Yep . Just had the ed 120 out. It sure is . Nothing like looking at planetary with a nice crystal clear frac. The BGO in support of course.☺

[John]

Just now, Timebandit said:

Yep . Just had the ed 120 out. It sure is . Nothing like looking at planetary with a nice crystal clear frac. The BGO in support of course.☺

Yep although the seeing tonight is not as good as the night before last when I had my 12" dob out. I've got the 130mm triplet out tonight. It deserves slightly better seeing than this

Still nice to be observing though

[John]

31 minutes ago, Stu said:

Just checked SkySafari; you can tell we are near opposition by how close Io is to its shadow, can't you?

Yep the two are right next to each other

(not that I can see Io itself just now - it must be pretty much the same colour as the cloud tops it's passing over)

[Paz]

I came in from looking at the moon and some doubles and left my stuff out to go out later for this transit. I had a look at about 23:30 but I could not see it.

Jupiter was fairly close to some rooftops and so was a bit wobbly but I could make out 3 belts ok (the two main equatorial ones plus a further one in the south). This was trying between 112x and 190x with the 127 Maksutov with admittedly the best views being only 112x.

[Knighty2112]

Yeah, just got in from a session. Managed to see Io's shadow quite well in my 4SE Mak. Best view was with my 14mm Morpheus EP. After that more power made it just became too messy to make out. Despite the moon I managed to bag Vesta again, and just see 41P with averted vision!  

[Peco4321]

Couldn't see it through the ep but did manage to get a picture of it. 

[John]

I found 171x gave the best views of Jupiter this evening with the 130mm refractor. Io shadow was very clear although the overall seeing was nothing special. 1 hour ago the transit looked like this (Virtual Planet Atlas image):