Jupiter After Finally Cleaning My Telescope

I’ll admit that I’m not the gentlest telescope owner, for years I kept it in a shed exposed to large temperature fluctuations and lots of dust. A cap on the aperture kept some dust out, but over time the abuse adds up. This summer we moved houses and there are a few dings on the body.

Today I finally took the primary and secondary mirrors out and gave them a good thorough cleaning. After putting them back I collumated the telescope as best as I could, and even used some hot glue to take some of the wiggle out of the screws that hold my secondary mirror in place.

Don’t let yours get as bad as mine!

I ended up using my 3x barlow lens which seems to work the best for planets and the ISS. None of my lenses are overly high quality, so it’s a bit of a shot in the dark. My 5x barlow is pushing things too far and never really works that well. My 2x barlow works well but the planets aren’t zoomed in enough on the camera to see enough detail. The 3x barlow is the sweet spot of zooming enough without zooming too much. I took a ~3 minute video at 2ms exposure and 350 gain. I stacked the top 20% of frames in Autostakkert, and applied wavelets in Registax.

I’m hoping with the clean mirrors and the more stable secondary mirror I’ll be able to get better images of the ISS. My best images of the ISS were a few years ago, and recently I haven’t been able to come close to what I was doing back then. I think it’s all these small imperfections in the telescope adding up.

Either way it’s lovely to be back outside in the yard without a heavy coat on!