After weeks of fog, rain, cloudiness and general lack of sky transparency, we finally had a clear night on Sunday night, so I trotted out my Mak to grab a look at Jupiter and Saturn.

It was a bit cold, but not unusually so for Sacramento. It was about 37F when I first went out. It dropped to 35F by mid-session, and was 34F when I came inside an hour and a half later. Humidity was 90%, according to the same cheapo thermometer/hygrometer.

The Little Feller was 70F when I put it outside at 6:30pm. I call this scope the Little Feller because at 9" it is somewhat smaller than my 10" dob, which is dubbed "The Big Feller". I'll have to change the names if I ever get a really big scope! The Little Feller towers well over 6ft when the dew shield is fully extended and it's pointing at Polaris atop its German Equatorial Mount.

My original plan to avoid dew was not to wait for the scope to come into thermal equilibrium, but to begin observing almost immediately. These plans were foiled, when, after 1/2 hour of cooling at 7pm, the images of Jupiter were still terrible, so I decided to let it cool more.

I returned outdoors around 8pm with my belly full and some chores behind me, and the view of Jupiter was satisfactory, though not excellent. I think the scope was still cooling, but I decided to start observing anyway. I was now in a race against dew.

During the evening, the lawn progressed from being squishy to crunchy. Dew was fairly severe, but it turned to ice on my table almost as soon as it formed. It made it seem colder than I think it really was. Ice even formed on the covers of my log book. I thought to myself, "Wow! I am a hard-core amateur astronomer."

I was never cold, being well prepared: I was wearing my AstroUnderwear (thermal), Polartec AstroSocks, AstroSnowShoes, AstroJacket and AstroCap. After observing Jupiter for a little while, my legs were a little cold, so I donned my Polartec-lined AstroPants.

I made a point of holding my breath when there was danger of me exhaling on my eyepiece. Often, I turned away from the eyepiece and did some deep breathing.

I could not see that much detail on Jupiter -- I've seen far more with the Big Feller. The best views were at 182x (17mm plossl ep). I was disappointed with the low power I was forced to use. I don't know whether a lack of collimation was the problem, or whether the seeing was just soft, or whether the scope was simply not in equilibrium yet. It made me wish I had the 10" out, to calibrate against. Maybe I'll do this next time.

I could see 3 belts on Jupiter: The N and S EB (Equatorial Belt) and NTB (North Temperate Belt). The N & S EBs were thick and brownish in contrast to the light tannish/whitish zones. There were two large darker brown masses in the NEB. The rest of the belts blended into both polar regions.

A slight assymmetry in the shape of the planet's disk suggested that I was seeing the terminator on the eastern (celestial) side.

Io was orange-ish. Ganymede was very bright. On the other side, Europa was fairly bright and distant Callisto was rather dim. Io had moved significantly closer to the planet in the time from 7pm to 8pm.

I could see 1 large darker gray band on yellowish Saturn (SEB), the Cassini Division in the rings, and was only able to barely see a hint of the Crepe Ring. I saw 5 moons: Iapetus (first time), Titan, Tethys, Rhea and Dione.

When I first looked at the moons, I only saw Titan (obviously orange and bright), Rhea and Dione, which is a disappointingly low number for Saturn, with its swarm of satellites. Rhea completed a square formed by the edge of the ring, the intersection of the ring with the planet and the southern limb of the planet. After staring for a while and switching eyepieces often, I noticed Tethys, which was tucked inside this square, even closer to the planet and the ring.

I spent a lot of time searching for other moons. Since I had never seen Iapetus (the moon David Bowman lands on in the book, "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur Clarke), I began searching for it. I knew that it is fairly bright, but ranges very far from the planet, so I searched beyond Titan, and immediately came upon a likely candidate about twice as far away from Saturn as Titan. It was whitish and slightly dimmer than Titan.

I also thought I saw a few others, perhaps 5% of the time. They were very emphemeral, and would only show as a brief flash, apparently during a moment of good seeing. The brief flashes would always occur at the same places. I marked the locations for later identification.

Worried about encroaching dew, I packed it in at about 9:30pm, as the moon rose above my neighbor's house. I would have checked out the moon, but I wanted to wait until it got high enough in the sky to offer a good view, but I didn't want to wait that long.

I later identified all the moons of both Jupiter and Saturn I observed with my newly acquired copy of SkyMap. What a wonderful tool! After setting the observing time and location appropriately, I zoomed in on the planets and saw schematics of the planets with their moons.

After flipping right and left, because I was using a diagonal, I saw the exact configurations of moons I had observed, except now more moons than I could see were visible, and they were labeled. What could be simpler?

Of course, the first thing I wanted after I saw this was an accurate portrayal of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. <sigh>

It is somewhat difficult to identify the moons of Saturn from the monthly diagrams in Sky & Telescope, primarily because the moons lie in a plane inclined at a significant angle to the earth. This causes the moons to appear virtually anywhere above and below the planet.

This is not the case with Jupiter.

I saw neither moons nor field stars at the positions of the ephemeral flashes I had marked on my sketch, and I'm not sure what I was seeing, if anything. I noticed that the flashes occurred most often immediately after putting my eye up to the eyepiece.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:         Dec 6, 1998 8pm-9:30pm (0300-0430 Dec 7 UTC)
Location:     Backyard in Roseville (near Sacramento), CA 121W 16', 38N
44'
Instrument:   Intes MK-91 9" f/13.6 Maksutov-Cassegrain
Oculars:      26mm, 17mm, 10mm, 7.5mm Sirius Ploessls
Seeing:       7/10