Finally, some steady skies

5 nights ago we had hazy skies here in Louth with some ground fog. So I thought: "perfect conditions for some steady seeing"! Sadly, something was going on farther up, as Jupiter and Saturn were a mess, and I measured seeing at about Pickering 5.

We had similar conditions last night, so I thought I'd take a quick look. It was obvious within seconds that it wasn't going to be quick: Jupiter took 350x with aplomb. So I jacked the 16" all the way up to 600x and spent about 10 minutes viewing, but only got four or five 1-second-long episodes of clarity. Dropping back down to 425x, I was getting clarity more than 50% of the time, and ended up spending about an hour and a half there.

I made out 3 very distinct blue festoons and one or two much less distinct ones. The GRS was setting, but I did see some shading differences between its interior and border before it was too far around on the disk. The equatorial region was chock full of subtle banding -- it looked as if it had been drawn by a child with a crayon. Just below the NEB I could see one long white area (almost as long as the GRS, but much narrower) followed by 3 white ovals. I made out several very faint bands in the north polar region.

I took a quick peek in the FC-100 as well (at 175x because I've got no way to get higher). The image was extremely sharp, but the scale or detail couldn't really compete with the big SCT. Seeing was measured using the FC-100 (which turned out to be the best I've seen since last October).

Equipment used:

16" LX200GPS OTA mounted on AP1200GTO
12mm Nagler T4 (350x)
17mm Nagler T4 + AP convertible barlow (425x)
12mm T4 + barlow (600x)

Tak FC-100 (piggyback on above)
9mm UO Ortho + AP barlow before diagonal (175x)

Conditions:
Brilliant seeing -- Pickering 7 with repeated episodes of 8
Abysmal transparency -- fog + nearly full moon limited NELM to between 2.0 and 2.5!

-- Jeff.