I didn't see the fabulous MIR pass last night, but I did get to view Jupiter on a night when the seeing was just short of superb.

Ah! Late evening - the kid's asleep, the dog is walked, the neighborhood is quiet. The perfect time to relax and wind down with a good dose of planetary viewing from the yard. I grabbed my 8" Newtonian and set 'er up on the front lawn. The collimation was almost dead on already, so that went fast. Also, one of the nice things about setting up at home is - AC POWER! I plugged in the old 115 VAC clock drive and settled down for a pleasant hour and a half or so.

The high clouds were fairly ubiquitous, and for much of the time made the moon look perfectly terrible, despite the very good seeing - the lunar illumination was so great that the clouds became tranlucent blankets that obscured most of the features. Jupiter, interestingly, did not have this problem. When the sky clouded, Jupiter would merely become dimmer. But when the sky cleared - well...

At 179x, the planet showed considerable detail. The two big bands around its midriff showed mottling along the edges, and two substantial features were present along the poleward side of one belt. One feature was lighter and beginning to exit around the western side of the planet, and the other, a darker brown feature with a trailing light area, as though scooped out from the main cloud belt, was moving on toward the meridian about 90 degrees behind the other. Early on I mistook one of them, the lighter one, for the GRS, which was in reality still invisible around its eastern flank for another 2 hours (I didn't find this out until this morning when I looked up the GRS transit times on http://www.skypub.com/). Several other cloud bands were visible, including 3 or 4 in each hemisphere poleward of the dark equatorial belts, and one narrow band almost precisely along the equator. Also moving toward the meridian from the eastern flank was the shadow of one of Jupiter's moons, although I couldn't identify which one it may have been. The shadow was picture-perfect, round and sharp. Incidentally, three moons were visible, two close in to the east and one far to the west.

Shortly after this, it became apparent that the seeing was quite good enough for 277x, currently my highest available power. Occasionally the seeing would wobble a bit, but especially by 0530 UT, it was excellent at least half the time. At times I could have used higher power if I had the eyepieces. Several festoons and swirls were visible at the best times in the dark bands, and a blue filter helped to enhance these features (although it didn't make any additional features visible). When clouds were not present, the contrast was excellent even without the filter. I watched until 0600, then decided that my 5:15 alarm was right around the corner and called it a night.

It was a real pleasure to relax and take in the easy-chair views of Jove on a warm summer night while the scope and the atmosphere did all the work. Oddly, several people went by in cars last night, many of whom saw me and obviously considered my activity, but none of whom thought to get out and see what I was doing. Were they afraid, in a hurry, or just disinterested? I'll never know, I guess, but whatever the reason, they missed a fine opportunity to see one of the sky's most wondrous sparkling gems.