Clear night and April Events

A very decent session last night tobegin the new month and the new lunar cycle.  The moon was a thin, 30 hour sliver and was nice to see so young.

I'll post more later as I have a number of new things to talk about.

But for now, here's an image from last night (notice I've reversed the greyscale, so black = bright):

Figure 1: The Jupiter system 04:00:52 UTC 01 April 2014

I've numbered five background stars in this image so you can compare it to the AAVSO sky chart of the same area:

Figure 2: AAVSO chart of same region

The crosshair in Figure 2 correspond to RA 06:49:14.5 and Dec +23:12:29.  I mention this because at least according to the ephemeris on the Heaven's Above website, Jupiter should be at RA 06:50:14.5 Dec +23:12:29.  As you can see from the image, Jupiter is not at the location specified by Heaven's Above.

This site seems to do a better job at calculating the correct position.  Here's the same chart showing the calculated position of Jupiter:

Figure 3: A better position of Jupiter marked

So, Heaven's Above -- you're fired!  This makes me question all the other information on this site now.

I'll make another post later today or tomorrow as I have a number of things to talk about.

==== Mid-day Update ====

Wow this is a really great site.  A lot of very useful info for me can be gotten from this site, including positions of the Jovian satellites and how far away they are from Jupiter.  Plus, very cool charts like this one:

April Jupiter moon eclipses that I'll be able to record:

DD  HMM.M

 6  414.0  II EC R

 8  343.8   I EC R

11  329.4 III EC R

15  538.8   I EC R

18  4 7.5 III EC D

There are also some near conjunctions that have become pretty interesting to record.

MMDDYY    Moons   HH:MM

040914    I/E     05:00
042214    I/E/C   03:00
050214    I/G     03:00
050414    I/E     03:00
050514    E/G     03:00
050614    I/G     05:00