The Planets Are Back!

Jupiter and Saturn are finally in the night sky at a reasonable time to observe them. Saturn is still relatively low in the sky, but Jupiter is looking like it will have some really good observation opportunities. Mars still has a little longer before I get good shots of that.

I set my gain to around 450 and then lowered my shutter speed as much as possible while still having a good histogram. Using my new 5x barlow lens I’m very zoomed in, so even holding the telescope steady seems to make blurry images from shaking. To fix this I experimented with letting the planets drift through the frame and resetting over and over. I have a lot of blank frames, but I’m hoping to good frames will be higher quality.

For Saturn I took about a 4 minute video, stacked in autostakkert, and sharpened with wavelets in registax and siril.

I’m pleased with this image, but I think my focus was a little off. That gap in the rings wasn’t really visible until I cranked up the wavelet sharpening.

The focus issues were more apparent on Jupiter, where one of the moons is visible and it’s definitely not a point of light.

Jupiter ended up being more grainy and less detailed than I liked, though some horizontal stripes are visible to the right of the great red spot which is promising. This was also before Jupiter was very high in the sky, so things are looking up!

I love when the planets are back in the sky!