This weekend weather in London was quite amazing: sunny, a bit too windy, but sky almost perfect. Seeing forecast was also encouraging, so on Friday evening I took a chance to shoot at Jupiter.
It was a bit of an unlucky evening: firstly I discovered that I forgot my red dot finder on, so the battery was totally drained. After struggling for a while trying to align my GoTo mount without it, I decided it was worth to leave the telescope alone for a few minutes (my garden is easly visible from the street... I didn't want to do it unless absolutely necessary) and got back inside to find new batteries.
After everything was aligned, and I was ready to observe and record my images, I noticed that the image wasn't exactly satisfying at the eyepiece. When I replaced the eyepiece with the camera, the very unfocused image revealed me why: some tree branches were in the way, and of course the image was deteriorated from the interference!
I looked around me to see if I could find a better spot to place my scope, but with no luck. I decided to try anyway, taking multiple shots, so maybe in some of them I might get an almost clear picture.
This is the best result I could get:
Jupiter, 25/03/2017
Blog article: [url=http://blog.gulinux.net/blog/2017-03-27-first-2017-jupiter]http://blog.gulinux.net/blog/2017-03-27-first-2017-jupiter[/url]
Of course, the difference with my previous shots taken with a bigger 200mm SC is pretty visible, but I think with better conditions this new telescope can do much more.
Since I made four sets of images, spanning a bit more than 40 minutes, I was also able to an animation showing Jupiter rotation:
Shots data:
- Celestron Nexstar SLT 127 Maksutov
- ZWO ASI 178mm with LRGB filters
- Software: my Planetary Imager for shooting, Autostakkert!2, Registax, Siril and GIMP for image processing.
Luminance channel: 4500 frames, best 20% used. R/G/B channels: 1000 frames, best 40% used.