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Russell,
I mostly image DSO’s with my cooled 2600MC but dabble in a bit of planetary imaging from year to year using my old Canon 600D my after following Jerry Lodriguss in the US about 5 years ago
You can just about use anything to do planetary but obviously 2 key factors are atmospheric seeing conditions and focal ratio
His general rule of thumb for planetary imaging is -
General rule of thumb to determine the “best focal ratio” of your image train for Lunar and Planetary imaging is -
Poor night of seeing 3.5 x pixel size of your camera
Average night of seeing 5 x pixel size of your camera
Good night of seeing 7 x pixel size of your camera
My old Canon has a pixel size of 4.3uM so on nights of average seeing I use a focal ratio close to f21 and nights of good seeing around f30
Here’s my images of Saturn and Jupiter captured last year on a night of average to good seeing using my 6” f6 GSO newt ( OTA cost me $299 ) and my 11 year old Canon 600D using a 4 x Powermate to achieve enough focal length for the required focal ratio
I’m using basic low end equipment ( beginners equipment) but you can still manage respectable planetary images using the above general rule of thumb and night of good seeing
Video data ( 1500 Avi frames ) was captured with BYEOS, stacked in Autostakkert 3 and sharpened etc... in Registax 6
Cheers
Martin
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