Some Solar System 13-14th Feb

von Tom (Tom) · #1 14-02-2011, 04:54 AM

Here are some shots of the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus from last night and this morning.

Jupiter and Venus were in very poor seeing down low. Saturn went from average to pretty good. It was nice to finally be up to see Saturn high in the sky.
The storm looks like Saturn is being unzipped!

All shots with the Canon 550D and Sky-Watcher 12" Auto Goto Dobsonian.

Thanks for looking : )

Tom

iceman (Mike) · #2 14-02-2011, 05:55 AM

Great images Tom, love the Moon and Saturn!

Shiraz (Ray) · #3 14-02-2011, 08:42 AM

Really good images Tom, particularly the Saturn sequence. Might be worth an animation? regards Ray

von Tom (Tom) · #4 14-02-2011, 08:50 AM

Thanks Mike, and thanks Ray - if I knew how to do one properly!

Tom

Ric · #5 14-02-2011, 12:15 PM

A nice selection Tom

The Moon images look fantastic.

Leeroy (Lee) · #6 14-02-2011, 05:17 PM

Nice pics of saturn mate..

I have a similar setup with a 10" skywatcher dob (no goto though) and canon eos 500D.

Do you use the movie mode on the camera or use a the live view back to the pc to record?
I'm still working on an equatorial table for my dob so it will be a while yet before i can try for some better shots of Saturn and Jupiter..

Cheers
Lee

Quark (Trevor) · #7 14-02-2011, 05:22 PM

Would have to echo Mikes comments Tom, an excellent effort with the Moon and Saturn.

Cheers
Trevor

Matt Wastell (Matt) · #8 14-02-2011, 07:50 PM

Hi Tom - I love the progression of Saturn - great presentation!
The Moon colour is quite different - very nice!

mswhin63 (Malcolm) · #9 14-02-2011, 08:21 PM

Hi Tom, nice Saturn images very crisp and nice rotation effect as well.

andyroo (Andrew) · #10 14-02-2011, 10:50 PM

Wow the colours on the moon are they correct? AMAZING if so.

michaellxv (Michael) · #11 14-02-2011, 11:09 PM

Tremendous work esp. moon and saturn.

von Tom (Tom) · #12 15-02-2011, 06:57 PM

Thanks for all the comments guys,

The presentation of the Saturn images reflects the angles Saturn appeared at as seen through the alt/az Dob as it rose. As the planet got closer to our meridian (near the right side of the image), it started to rotate quite quickly, so my normal 2 minute MOVs were reduced to 1 minute to stop field rotation during exposure.

The colours are as captured by the camera. I shot the still images in RAW format, maximised the saturation during development in Canon's Digital Photo Professional program, stacked in Registax, and saturation of the resulting TIF increased again in Photoshop.

The exposures for Saturn was 1/60th sec at ISO1600. Landscape Picture Style with maxed contrast, saturation and sharpness.
The exposures for Jupiter was 1/60th sec at ISO400 with the same Picture Style settings.
The exposures for Venus was about 1/500th sec at ISO100 with minimised contrast in-camera.

Lee, the planetary images are done using the Canon EOS 550D's 640x480 in-camera movie crop mode (ie the centre 640x480 of the sensor) at 60fps, with 4x worth of teleconverters at prime focus of the 12" Dob, for 1-2 minutes for each image. I haven't yet tried to hook up the laptop to the camera.

The Moon shot was a stack of 10 still images using the 550D at prime focus on the 12" Dob (1250th sec at f/5 1500mm. The zoomed in image is a crop of the original.

Cheers,

Tom