Spoilt myself by purchasing a new Skywatcher Esprit 100 last week for some hopefully wonderful widefield shots in the future but the moon has prevented me from doing that just now, so I'll just have to wait. In the meantime, I thought I would test it out on Jupiter yesterday morning. I wasn't expecting a great deal from a 4 inch 550mm scope but it did surprise me with the result. Despite using a cheap 2X Barlow and 6mm eyepiece, the Triplet held it together to obtain some surface detail. Love to see what a good quality ED Barlow and eyepiece could achieve.
Details are: Unmodded Canon 550d in movie crop mode. Eypiece projection method, 183X mag. 3000 frames at 50 fps @800 iso stacked and adjusted in Registax/Photoshop.
Thanks for your compliments and interest Anth, Peter and Colin. I'll probably revisit all the the objects I shot with my older gear and photograph them again using my new setup. At least I have a benchmark to improve on. This small scope should be a lot of fun.
I've been meaning to photograph Jupiter for years on something other than my iPhone! I've got a tiny extra 30mm on you so you've set yourself a benchmark for me to aim at
Go for it Colin, quite happy for you to knock me off the perch! I'm glad I've set you up a challenge. Let's give all those with smaller scopes inspiration to give it a go. You don't need a big scope to have fun.
