ALPER CHRISTOPHER GO RED, JR. IMAGE FEATURED IN MAJOR ASTRONOMY SITES |
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March 3, 2006 by James Kevin Ty |
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| A local amateur astronomer from Cebu City is now the talk of the town in the local and international astronomy community for his monitoring of a Jupiter cloud feature called Oval BA. Christopher Go, a member of the Astronomical League of the Philippines living in Banilad, Cebu City, He normally tries to observe and image Jupiter and Saturn whenever the sky is clear and submit his reports and images to various US-based astronomical organizations such as ALPO (Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers) , NASA, etc. Our very own member Christopher Go's latest Jupiter image was taken last February 28th 03:37 Philippine Standard Time (February 27th in 19:37 Universal Time) was featured in various international astronomy websites such as Spaceweather.com (Click on March 6 archive) , NASA, Sky and Telescope (March 6 news), Space.com, as well as local news sites such as GMA7 Breaking News (March 8 news) , Philippine Star (March 12) , Freeman (March 11) , Manila Bulletin (March 11) for his remarkable image of the planet that show the current jovian "crazed" feature, the "Red, Jr." He uses a Celestron C-11 Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope mounted on an AP-900 equatorial mount and a DMK21BF04 monochrome camera to image Jupiter. RGB is done using a Homeyer Filter wheel. Image capture is done using IC Capture 2.0 and processing with Registax 3.
Position of Red, Jr. Click the above image for bigger view. @ Chris Go (ALP) Until this feature had become prominent, most of the observers had GRS (Great Red Spot) as the most interesting object to observe on Jupiter. But now that the Red, Jr. had appeared, it is trying to match GRS as the new widely observed feature in the coming days or months perhaps. Chris Go was able to image the feature prominently last February 27th. The origin of the Red, Jr. was believe to have born in March 2000 when white ovals BE and FA merged to form Oval BA.. The event had led to to the formation of this new feature. Initially, the feature was white in color but recently has change its color to a bit reddish, which astronomers believe is a sign of intensification of the storm. But so far, the size of the storm appears unchanged. The feature requires more or less a 10 inch telescope to see it visually But imaging this feature with a webcam can be registered with at least a 6 inch or larger scope. "The storm first started to appear brown last December 2005 but started to redden several weeks ago." as quoted by Chris Go. The Red, Jr. can be seen in the South Temperate Belt, south of and preceding the Great Red Spot by about 1 hour in term of Jupiter's rotation. His latest work has put the Philippines on the map of the astronomy community with his never tiring dedication on trying to image the bright planets, particularly Jupiter , Saturn and Mars! For more of his great images, please visit his astro gallery at http://astro.christone.net/. On behalf of ALP, congratulations for another great work!
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For Comments jkty@astroleaguephils.org |
