Jupiter and Saturn with New 3x Barlow Lens

A few nights ago as I was photographing Jupiter I realized my 2x barlow did better than my 4x barlow. I am pretty sure this is because the 4x barlow is actually two 2x barlows stacked together and that’s too much inexpensive glass to see a clear image through. To see if I could improve this I found a $30 3x barlow lens on amazon and decided to give it a shot!

Again, I woke up in the middle of the night like a lunatic and set everything up. I collimated as best as I could, and I focused my camera using Jupiter’s moons. I used a short exposure time of about 5ms and selected a gain to give me a good exposure histogram. Once again I used my camera’s “high speed” setting to get as many frames as I could, and ended up with roughly 5000 frames.

I used PIPP to convert my video to individual frames so that I can manually throw out bad frames created by the camera “fast mode”. Autostakkert stacked 33% of frames with 1.5x drizzle, and wavelet sharpening was done in Siril.

This is clearly the sharpest image of Jupiter I’ve ever achieved. I definitely haven’t ever captured those small southern hemisphere storms before!

Next up was Saturn, and after my bad results a few nights ago I didn’t have very high expectations. Saturn was a struggle to expose correctly, because my gain had to go uncomfortably high to keep exposure lengths short enough to stop the planet from blurring in the frame. Saturn shutter speed was about 50ms.

Once again I converted my video to individual frames with PIPP to throw out any bad frames. I stacked with 50% of frames in Autostakkert with 1.5x drizzle, and did final wavelets sharpening in Siril.

This result was by far my best Saturn ever, that gap in the rings is clear all the way around!

I also tried to expose Jupiter at 0.505ms exposure time to see if ISS captures would be remotely possible with this lens. I think it will be but it will be at the limit of what my telescope and camera setup is capable of. I’m excited to try it out!