Starlog June 4th, 2018, 9:30 p.m. local time
Most of my recent astro-imaging has been through my 254mm Dobsonian. Its main advantage, within my arsenal of equipment, is its mirror size, allowing for the most light gathered. Its primary disadvantage is lack of automatic tracking.
So for a change of pace, I took out my 125mm Mak-Cass last night, which is able to locate and track objects in the sky. It is not perfect, but it gets you to where you’re going, or looking, and stays on the target far longer than the manual Dobsonian can. Whereas I refer to my Dobsonian as a “light cannon,” the Mak-Cass with its proportionately longer focal length relative to the size of its primary mirror is more akin to a sniper rifle, for pinpoint accuracy on very small patches of the sky.
The current positions and timing of our planets offer an opportunity to see both Jupiter and Venus in the sky shortly after Dusk, with the former in the Southeast and latter descending in the West. I will have a separate post for Venus later.
Jupiter came out surprisingly well. The biggest challenge was adjusting the smartphone mount on the eyepiece. It was very difficult to center the camera lens just right. I think this was in part due to the eyepiece used – a 14.5mm planetary viewer, which is not designed to hold a smartphone mount well. It is great for simply looking with your eye, but not for attaching cameras.
My only regret on this image is that it is slightly out of focus. I tried to minimize the impact with post-processing. I was pressed for time and forgot to do a few refocuses as I normally would.
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