Last week I mentioned that I had one other planet to show from my telescope work on the evening of July 8th. It was about as perfect of a night for early July in Summer, so I kept my camera and telescope out for hours. I first photographed the Moon, followed by Jupiter. About an hour later, I took pictures of the other visible planet that night, Saturn.
Saturn was at opposition. As I had not filmed Saturn since last year, I was very worried that the results would not be good. It is harder than Jupiter to manually track with my Dobsonian telescope, because it is dimmer.
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The above image was stacked from the final two videos I took (17 videos in total). With these final two, I lowered the video exposure to 60.
For the first 18 videos, I let in more light with exposure 30. They were good as well, but not as good, I thought, as the image produced from exposure 60. Now normally, I stack only three videos at a time. But I decided to try stacking all the good videos (i.e. good focus), of which there were nine. Below is the result, after some final post-processing touchups (as I did with the image above as well).
Summary of my equipment, settings, and software used:
- Telescope: Dobsonian reflector 254mm / 10″ (homemade)
- Camera: Canon EOS Rebel SL1
- Barlow: TeleVue Powermate x5 1.25″
- Filter: Baader Neodymium 1.25″
- Canon T ring and adapter
- Relevant camera settings:
- ISO 1600
- Exposure: 30 & 60
- Set 1: Two 24-29 second videos at exposure 60
- Set 2: Composite of nine 24-29 second videos at exposure 30; refocused after three videos at a time
- Software for post-processing:
- PIPP
- Autostakkert
- Registax 6
- PaintShop Pro 2018 for final minor touchups
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