Zoomed In Planets with a new Barlow Lens

I recently realized that my telescope and camera were capable of much more zoom than I was using. My telescope is f/5 and with a 2x barlow I was only getting about f/10. Many planetary images are taken around f/20-f/25. There are a couple ways of reaching f/20, I can use a 4x barlow or stack a second 2x barlow on top of my existing 2x barlow.

In the end I decided to go with another 2x barlow. I know by stacking two barlow lenses on top of one another I’m adding more glass between the mirrors and my camera, but the price was right at only $40. My zoom should be double compared to my previous pictures, which means each planet should have 4x the number of pixels (2x in each dimension).

Thankfully Jupiter and Saturn are up at somewhat normal times of night now, and waiting for them to get high in the sky doesn’t require losing lots of sleep.

Each picture was a 3 minute video which resulted in ~6000-7000 frames each. I used PIPP to align and crop the frames, Autostakkert to do the stacking, and sharpened with wavelet filters in Registax. Stacking was done on the best 25% of frames. I used my dobsonian telescope, 4x barlow (two 2x lenses), and my ASI290MC camera.

I’m thrilled with the extra detail on Jupiter, and the extremely sharp gap in the rings on Saturn. Hopefully soon I’ll use this new setup to take an animation of Jupiter rotating. I’m also excited to see if I can catch the space station like this, it’ll be much harder manual pointing, and it will be much dimmer with this setup, but who knows!