Photo of the Week for June 10, 2016
Saturn and Mars get a lot of attention from observers, but no planet rewards telescopic viewing night after night the way Jupiter does. It’s just never the same twice. Saturn and its rings are beautiful — there’s no denying that — but static. Go out on successive nights and you’ll see essentially the same thing. Mars is grand at the moment, but as each week goes by the planet shrinks a little in size, rendering its surface markings more and more difficult to perceive. Meanwhile, there’s Jupiter with its ever-changing spots, belts, festoons and array of dancing moons.
Drummondville, Quebec, imager André Montambault captured this portrait of Big Jove on March 26, 2016. He used a Celestron C11 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope equipped with a 2× Barlow lens and a ZWO ASI120MM monochrome CCD camera to record AVI data through infrared, green, and blue filters.
