The autumn has set in but remarkably, the weather in W-Europe is quite good for the season. Both september and october have had their good share of sunny days and clear nights. In other words, enough nights to do observations for our W-European fellow astronomers. In Bari however, this is another story. Autumn means increased humidity and high but thin cloud layers. This, together with the high light pollution, makes it challenging to even engage into small band photography. So I'll have to wait for the odd nights that are dry and give me good transparency readings again. I therefore expect to go back to NL a bit more to compensate for these losses. However, NL activities will be restricted to visual observing only. At least, until summer 2012.

Last week, I had another night of high clouds and was on standby for work but was not called out. I noticed that I still had this SPC900 (web)cam with a IR block filter and have never used it. I originally bought it 3 or 4 years ago to make a start into astrophotography. This evening was not good voor DSO imaging due to the clouds but it was sufficient for planetary imaging. Jupiter was visible now and then. I set up the scope and I did a 1-star alignment which is sufficient for planetary guiding. It took me 20 minutes to wait for a suitable alignment star but once that was done, I was up and running. After that, some focus tests took place and then it was time to slew to Jupiter. While the scope was slewing my laptop was showing a live stream of the camera's output. And suddenly, there it was! A smudged live image of Jupiter. A big disk which clearly showed the equatorial cloud bands and some other subtile details. It was amazing to see what a relatively simple setup could achieve. After tuning the focuser, I got an nice, quite sharp video stream of the planet and decided to capture 3, 5 minutes movies. Quickly after that, the clouds became thicker and Jupiter was gone for that evening. But I had 3 movies to choose from. I choosed the best, extracted it's frames, stacked it, let the stacking app to do some calculations to get more details et voila. There it was: my first planetary image. And I am proud because it is another personal foot step made into astronomy..

Over the next months I will capture more planets to see how far I get with the optics I have. So stay tuned!