Jupiter Dobbed in 19 July 2019

[foc (Ross)]

With my Celestron C6 boxed waiting for some warranty work on on the worm gears, an unexpected break in the clouds and wind here in Canberra led to me getting out the GSO 10 inch Dob on its original base and doing some crude manual planet chasing with the ASI 1224mc in frigid conditions. I was hoping to combine a large set of runs (or fly by s as Jupiter shoots through the camera's view) but I was not able to control the 'smoothness' of the Alt az adjustments sufficiently. After a purge with PIPP managed to get nearly 1300 complete frames on Jupiter in this run so here is the result which may encourage (or discourage) those with lesser mounts to track with!

[LostInSp_ce]

Great effort and I'm sure it will encourage others. Planetary imaging although challenging isn't impossible with a dob. In some ways I think it's more exciting because of the chase. I too think it's a great way for those starting out to image on the cheap and with the least amount of technical knowledge.

A lot of my planetary imaging has been done with a dob, usually at the end of an observing session. Once my eyes have had enough, if I'm not too tired, I'll quickly attach the camera and capture some frames. The biggest challenge I have isn't the chasing but the speed. I use a mono camera and a manual filter wheel so I have to quickly change filter, nudge scope then re-focus because my cheap filters aren't exactly parfocal. If I'm not fast enough then I'll have too much rotation between filter changes and won't be able to align the RGB data when processing.

But you're right in that you can still get good images without a tracking mount.
All that's required really is patience.