Jupiter and Saturn Are Back!

In the last few weeks I’m starting to see more and more photos of Jupiter popping up in my twitter feed, and I thought it might be time for me to give it a shot. Both Jupiter and Saturn are very low in the sky, Jupiter only reaches about 37 degrees elevation, while Saturn barely gets above 30 degrees.

I was interested in trying Jupiter with the new “fast mode” that I discovered my camera is capable of. Last year I was stacking roughly 2000 frames together, but this morning I was able to get 7000 frames in a fraction of the time. Conditions were not great, probably some lingering wild fire smoke, but it’s still probably my best Jupiter photo yet. Saturn was pretty disappointing, I couldn’t even see the Cassini gap.

One other experiment I tried was using 2x and 4x barlow lenses. Amazingly I got better results with the 2x lens, but that might change with better conditions and longer capture lengths. I collimated and focused as best I could and then set up my camera. I don’t remember the exact settings, but I tried to have the shortest exposure time possible to allow me to take a large amount of frames quickly,

It’s nice to finally have these two back in the night sky, though I wish they were higher so I could get a clearer image! Once these creep closer to normal evening hours I’ll get plenty more images.