Jupiter Sept 5 2010 0732 UTC

Clouds came in fast tonight so I wasn't able to get many shots.
I usually take twenty or so images and then sort through them until I find some that are okay.
I was looking for M31, or the Andromeda galaxy but my laser pointer thingy wasn't working and ten or so minutes of searching proved fruitless.
Andromeda is a nekkid eye object if you have dark enough skies:



Okay, it doesn't look like that with your eyeballs or even through a small telescope. It looks mostly like a white puffy thingy or a cotton ball.
It lies below the four stars that make up the Great Square of Pegasus and a little to the left.
It was easy enough to find in binoculars, but the field is small in the telescope eyepiece and I just couldn't approximate the area close enough.
Maybe tomorrow night.
So anyways, here's Jupiter again:



The lines point to the four Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Again, here's the link to the Jupiter moon thingy so you, the reader, can figure out what's what.
The images were taken on Sept. 5, at 0732 UTC.
I was thinking last night about how to image the planet a little better. The thing is, Jupiter is so bright, it washes itself out.
If you also want to catch the moons that is.
So I sped up the shutter to try and catch some detail.
Here's what Jupiter looks like:



You can see how the surface is made up of different colored bands.
The surface is constantly changing so it sort of always looks a bit different.
Here's what I got:



You can just about see the northern equatorial band. For some reason, I cannot make out the southern one. Perhaps the air is just not good for Jupiter was still sort of low on the horizon.
Here's another image:



You can click on the pics to make em bigger.
I'd say that's pretty good for a hand held camera through the eyepiece image.
I used to be able to make out both bands and sometimes other bands, but that was at around 100x, which I don't have anymore.
All of my images were taken through a 70mm refractor at 37X.
I'm gonna try and tripod the camera to reduce the noise next time. Tonight, as I said, the clouds came in, and it began to drizzle a bit.
Not good for the optics, don't you know.
As you know, Jupiter has a Red Spot, but I never saw it through this scope. Just not enough resolving power.
That means not enough objective lens.
Looking at the gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn still freaks me out a bit. I mean seeing them out there, reminds me of the planet we live on.
Oh, Jupiter factiod:
Jupiter rotates once every ten hours, so rapidly that it creates a bulge at it's equator.