Nice Summer Evening for Planets and the Milky Way

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Tonight was a beautifully clear evening so I had to take the telescope out.

I hadn't taken a good picture of Saturn yet this summer, so that was absolutely on the list. A quick look online also showed that Jupiter was going to have the shadow of Ganymede showing, so Jupiter went on the list as well.

One last thing I wanted to try was to get a picture of the milky way. The sky was clear and it was almost a new moon so this would be my best chance. Unfortunately New Jersey is not known for its dark skies, so we'll see how that photo goes!

Saturn

Saturn 2~2.png

I took a 2 minute video with my webcam and 2x Barlow lens. Saturn is somewhat dim for my webcam so I had to reduce the frame rate and extend the shutter time. By doing this I introduced some blur into the video from hand tracking the telescope, so instead of constant tracking I would find Saturn and let go of the telescope to let it drift across the frame a few times.

This method gave me a lot of unusable frames, so after aligning and cropping in PIPP I stacked 25% of the remaining frames in autostakkert. The image was sharpened with wavelet filters in registax.

Jupiter

Jupiter 2 with Ganymede~2.png

Jupiter was also a 2 minute video from my webcam with 2x Barlow lens. Frames were aligned and cropped in PIPP, stacked 25% of frames in autostakkert, and finally sharpened with wavelet filters in registax.

I had seen the shadow of Io on Jupiter before, but I was surprised how large Ganymedes shadow is!

Milky Way

processed_DSCF1679_01~3.jpg

I experimented with a bunch of different exposures to try and catch the milky way but settled on 20 seconds at ISO 400 and f3.4. I shot in RAW and tried my best at processing the image in darktable, but I'm not great at processing these images yet. I really had to push it to get anything visible so there's a lot of noise in the image, but it's my first time seeing the galaxy!

If you can't see it, the galaxy is oriented vertically in the center of the frame. It looks like it's rising out of the center tree.

Unfortunately I think this is the best I'll ever manage from New Jersey, one day I'll have to plan a trip to the American southwest!