I find the early morning setups of SCTs for planetary imaging a bit painful and we often have heavy damp or cloud. So this time I went for the easier setup of my 5 inch scope. It is a CFF140mm refractor and on Sunday morning I took it out for Saturn, Mars, Venus and Jupiter with the edge of the moon (taken Sat night) for good measure.
At f.75 without a flattener or corrector this scope was not designed as an imaging scope per se but like most refractors gives quite good contrasty images of planets. With the planets so far from opposition the 2.5x powermate fitted into an ADC thins out the limited light when providing the much needed magnification for Mars at 5.6" or when showing the moons close to Saturn or storms on Jupiter but I think the images obtained still look pretty decent.
Very nice set of images, the luna images is nicely focused and crisp and isn't it great that another planet season is ramping up. Another month or so when they are a bit higher up before dawn will be when it starts to get interesting.
Thanks for the supportive comments. It always helps me to think that my post is worth while.
I would be interested to see how the 5.5 incher performs when the planets are higher and the sky is free of high cloud. At the moment I agree; Jeff, the moon took the barlowing very well in comparison to the planets.
I am not really an early morning person but Mars this year is going to be a bit challenging later on at it moves North and low so I am keen to get a few goes at it while it is in the 6 to 8 " region
While I do need to get the larger SCTs better collimated and equilibrated, and dew free and put into action the low fuss refractor is a nice option.
These are great! I think you've even got some cloud features in Venus' atmosphere. Well done! A 5.5-incher is no slouch, especially when the data is processed well, as we can see here.
Hi Mirko, I kept the brightness down in Venus for the possibility of cloud features. They look like they are in the right place for an OSC view but hard to rule out artefacts.
Trevor, thanks for your Saturn comment. I should say this Saturn is a composite image. Somewhat crudely, I made a duplicate of the original image in GIMP and brightened the bulk of the image while darkening Saturn itself then over-laid it with my original image, dropped the opacity of the upper layer until the moons showed up and then merged the two images.
Hi Mirko, I kept the brightness down in Venus for the possibility of cloud features. They look like they are in the right place for an OSC view but hard to rule out artefacts.
They look very much like the real deal. A great capture.
