Great Red Spot visible on Jupiter -10/03/15

Hi all.

If the skies remain reasonably clear tonight, some vintage or first timers might try and observe the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. It will be visible on the central meridian at 21.45. Let us try and figure out what colour it is -this can be interesting. Magnifications of at least 150 X are recommended as the GRS is quite small these days.

Clear skies,

Aubrey.

HI Aubrey. I observed the GRS with on Sunday night in very steady seeing. It was quite prominent at a magnification of 133x and appeared to me to be a brownish orange colour. With Jupiter so high in the sky at the moment, tonight would indeed be an excellent opportunity to check it out.
Mike

Yes, Mike. I would agree with your brownish orange description. I had a lot of haze early on, but the sky did clear quite significantly at about 9pm. All 4 moons were easy to see even at 11X. But I could only see the 2 main belts. The GRS was a charming oval shape jutting south of the South Equatorial Belt. I went up to magnification 225X on Jupiter.

But I do like the way Jupiter is heading towards Carbon star X Cancri. It is about 4 degrees west of it now. I observed X Cancri tonight, and estimated its magnitude at +6.2. Another carbon star I estimated was W Orionis -very nice at 6.4.

Castor was a lovely split at 112X; as was Kappa Geminorum. Tegmine (Zeta Cancri) is getting easy to split too. 225X is sufficient to observe all 3 components.

This was my 9th observing session of 2015. I trust my 10th night will be more successful.

Clear skies.

Aubrey.