How To Use A Telescope To See Planets (and photograph them, too)

stay tuned after this video where i show you how to take awesome pictures of the planets using your cell phone hey everyone john reed here author of 50 things to see with a telescope well this is video number 28 in my astronomy challenge series and we're finally going to talk about viewing planets through a telescope why did it take me so long to get to this well viewing planets can be more challenging than you might think but i'm gonna fix that this is learn to [Music] stargaze but before we talk about looking at the planets through a telescope you need to learn to find the planets at least mercury venus mars jupiter and saturn and you need to learn to find them without a telescope because if you can't find them without a telescope i guarantee you won't be able to find them with a telescope we'll talk about neptune and uranus last because you do need a telescope to see these planets the word planet originates from a greek word meaning wanderer and this is because planets appear to wander across the sky from day to day and month to month that said they don't wander all over the sky they're always found near the ecliptic ecliptic is just a fancy word for the path the sun takes across the sky now the planets are found near the ecliptic because the planets orbit the sun in a disk we call the plane of the solar system and here on earth we are within that plane now here's a fun fact about the ecliptic here's me living in the northern hemisphere in the summertime at night here's the sun and here's the ecliptic or plane of the solar system look at where i'm standing on the earth notice how low the ecliptic must be in the sky that's why saturn in 2020 which was in the summertime constellation sagittarius appeared so low in the northern hemisphere sky now fast forward a few months to winter of 2021. here's me living in the northern hemisphere again now in the middle of the night notice how high the ecliptic is that's why the planet mars appears almost directly overhead so why does this matter well objects overhead offer clearer views because we're looking at them through less of earth's atmosphere they're also higher above the horizon and less likely to be blocked by trees or buildings venus and mercury however orbit closer to the sun than the earth and therefore never stray far from the sun and can only be viewed either just before sunrise or just after sunset and because these are viewed around sunset or sunrise the ecliptic is highest in the first day of spring for sunset and the first day of autumn for sunrise and wow this is getting complicated so the best thing to do is not think about anything i just said and try to see planets whenever they are visible because life is short and if you wait for things to be perfect you'll probably get clouded out anyway now here's an interesting question can you see the planets during the day yes with a telescope you absolutely can though it helps to have a very good computerized telescope but in fact you can see venus during the day without a telescope however without an object like the moon positioned nearby it's nearly impossible for your eyes to focus correctly and all you'll see is blue sky even if you're looking in the right direction but if venus and the moon are very close together then it's easy to see the tiny white dot that is venus near the moon in the daytime sky you can also easily see planets and a few bright stars during a total solar eclipse of the sun like in 2017 when i was in nebraska for the great american eclipse and saw several planets during the day in any case if you do try to see planets during the day do not point your telescope anywhere near the sun because you could go blind alright now i just want to go over a few terms you might hear when researching the planets first you might hear about conjunctions well we talked about conjunctions in a previous video to put it simply this generally refers to when two or more planets or the moon appear near each other in the sky you may also hear the term opposition this is when a planet is directly opposite the sun from the earth this also means that the planet is near its closest to earth and also that it's the highest in the sky in the middle of the night opposition is generally a great time to see a planet with a telescope less frequently you may hear the term greatest elongation this only refers to venus and mercury and occurs when the planet appears farthest from the sun when viewed from earth you may also hear the term retrograde which simply means that the earth has passed a planet in its orbit just like you might pass another car on the freeway and like the car you just passed the planet will briefly appear to be traveling in the other direction as it moves across the sky to be clear a planet in retrograde has absolutely no impact on daily life here on earth and now phases just like the moon has phases so do venus and mercury this is because those planets orbit closer to the sun than the earth and we often face their nighttime sides these phases may be harder to observe with mercury because mercury is a challenge to observe anyway since it's close to the sun but with venus the phases are actually quite pronounced through a telescope now onto finding the planets so what's the best way to know what planets are visible on a given night now there are so many options all of which work equally well you could subscribe to a magazine like sky news or you could use the rasc nighttime almanac for the given year or you can check the internet i often use a website called skymaps.com and use their evening sky map but most often what i do is simply check free astronomy software like stellarium now i pretty much only stargaze in the evening within a few hours of sunset so when i use stellarium to learn what's up i just set the time to approximately an hour after sunset and then fast forward a few weeks to see what the planets are doing be sure to select planets from the bottom menu so as an example let's look at the spring summer and fall of 2020. we started the year with venus high in the sky after sunset mercury makes a brief appearance then we have saturn and jupiter hanging out over here in sagittarius mars is high in the sky as it reaches opposition providing incredible views even through small telescopes we ended 2020 with a beautiful conjunction of jupiter and saturn and finally how do we find these planets in our telescopes so from this point onward i'm going to assume that you've determined exactly where the planets are going to be on the night that you're doing you're observing this is january of 2021 so i'm going to use mars as a quick example you can see it here to the west of the constellation orion when first attempting to view a planet make sure you remove any barlows from your telescope choose your lowest powered eyepiece that's the one with the highest focal length the focal length of the eyepiece is always written right on the eyepiece using as little magnification as possible will make the planet much easier to find in the telescope so now that you can clearly see the planet in the sky without the telescope now you take your telescope and point it in the general direction of the planet then you move to your finder center the planet precisely in the finder and then move to the eyepiece if the planet does not appear on your eyepiece then the telescope and the finder are pointed in different directions and you'll want to go back to video number 22 in this series how to use a beginner telescope now take the time to make sure that your focus is perfect remembering that the focus may be unique to your prescription so if you're stargazing with others make sure you teach them to focus the telescope for themselves planets should appear as crisp and clear as possible now take a moment to observe and appreciate the planet at this minimal magnification if it's mars it'll probably look like a bright red star but if it's jupiter you'll see the four galilean moons and if it's saturn though small you should still be able to see the rings once you've mastered observing the planets at low magnification now it's time to zoom in you do this by removing the low-powered eyepiece in my case this is a 20 millimeter eyepiece and adding a higher powered eyepiece in my case it might be the 10 millimeter eyepiece that came with this telescope now look through the eyepiece again center the planet and again refocus until the planet is clear and crisp and finally to zoom in even more now we add the barlow remove the eyepiece and put the barlow between the eyepiece and the telescope and again you'll need to look in the eyepiece center the telescope and refocus the telescope making sure the planet is clear and crisp if you've lost the planet you may need to remove the barlow and return again to the lowest powered eyepiece starting the process over you may also notice that although the barlow allowed you to zoom in it didn't necessarily improve your view this is because you may be approaching your telescope's maximum useful magnification in which case the objects will appear slightly blurry no matter how much you try to focus to determine the maximum useful magnification of your telescope take the aperture in inches and multiplied by 50. this telescope has an aperture of about four inches and therefore has a maximum useful magnification of about 200. now before we talk about uranus and neptune i have a quick message for beginner telescope users telescopes can be frustrating maybe you're having trouble getting the scope set up and focused and maybe you're having trouble finding cool stuff to see in the sky even if you're using a computerized telescope that's why i wrote the 50 things to see with the telescope series this series solves these problems each book starts with clear instructions on how to use your telescope and then shows you how to find cool stuff in the night sky most importantly it shows you exactly what you should expect to see through your eyepiece from our most popular book 50 things to see with a telescope to the award-winning 50 things to see on the moon and the teacher friendly 50 things to see with a telescope activity workbook there's something for you if you enjoy the content here on learn to stargaze please consider one of these books i guarantee it will vastly improve your stargazing experience now back to the planets so so far this video we've looked at how to find planets that are visible to the naked eye but what about uranus and neptune these planets can be challenging to find in backyard telescopes they are easiest to find with a computerized telescope or with the new celestron star sense which uses your phone to precisely point the telescope but if you don't have any type of computerized assistance you'll have to star hop to the planet to do this bring up the planet in astronomy software and note exactly where it is using neighboring stars as a reference build a set of directions to the planet based on these reference stars and point your telescope precisely at this location using your finder as an example here's uranus as it appears tonight january 27 2021 here we can see that uranus is located near mars and near this hexagon of stars which is an asterism called the head of the whale using mars and the base of this asterism we can star hop to uranus by forming a right angle as shown now we just point the telescope exactly at this spot and if you're using a finder scope you may be able to see uranus or neptune in the finder as a small bright dot assuming the finder scope itself is powerful enough if you're using a red dot binder or a towel rad like this one you won't see it since these finders do not provide any magnification even if you're searching for uranus and neptune you'll want to start with the lowest powered eyepiece as soon as you've found it then you'll want to move up to higher powered eyepieces and maybe even the barlow depending on the size of your telescope you may be able to resolve the planet's disk and see one or more of its moons moving on now i've been getting a lot of questions about zoom eyepieces for viewing planets like the celestron 8 to 24 millimeter should you get one well a zoom ip simply saves you from having to switch eyepieces to zoom in so if you think that's worth the cost then go for it but it's not a whole lot different than just using the two eyepieces that probably came with your telescope well after you've found a planet that looks cool to your eye like saturn and if you're like most people you'll want to photograph it and share that photo with your friends so here's how you do that so when taking a photo of a planet with a cell phone there are a few things you'll want to consider first it takes practice and a lot of practice the phone must be lined up perfectly for the image to appear on the screen that's why it helps to have a phone adapter like this one and for those that are wondering this is probably the best cell phone adapter there is this is the celestron next yz now i'm going to show you what it looks like to do this without the phone adapter for this video we're just going to use the eyepiece and hold the phone up to the eyepiece to take the picture the second thing you'll want to consider is the camera app you're using to take the picture now i usually use the standard app that comes with the camera but the challenge here can be getting focus and setting the correct exposure it's important that the planet not be too bright or overexposed using an app like nightcap allows you to lock the focus and the exposure because you need the planet to appear decently on the screen for this technique to work the third thing to consider are the eyepieces and barlows you'll be using and this is where you really need to experiment for yourself just as it was with visual observing it's easiest to find the planet with the lowest powered eyepiece and no barlow however without higher powered eyepieces and maybe a barlow the planet will appear tiny on the phone's screen so you'll need to find the eyepiece and barlow combination that works best for you so for this image i used a 20 millimeter eyepiece and a 2x barlow attached to the telescope so here's how you image the planet first you set your phone to video mode if you try to take a photo using the photo setting it's unlikely that you'll get a decent image next you want to make sure that the planet is centered in the finder and the eyepiece and that it's in focus now here's the tricky part you now need to get the planet centered precisely on the phone's screen and you need to be able to hold it steady i usually cut my hand around the eyepiece and gently hold the phone moving it ever so slightly to get that planet centered now it's okay if the planet bounces around on the screen we're going to fix that when we get this video file onto the computer now once you've got the planet centered on the screen you're going to want to zoom in just a little bit you're going to then adjust the exposure so that you can see details on the planet as much detail as you can and you're going to want to make sure that that focus is as good as you can make it so you'll probably want to do a combination of focusing on the telescope itself and focusing in the camera's application as well now what you're going to do is take a video now the video could be anywhere between 5 and 30 seconds but for the duration of the video you're going to do your best to see if you can keep that planet centered on the screen now as you can tell i'm not actually outside i'm in my office fortunately i did get a video of saturn using this exact setup about two months ago so i'm gonna move that file onto the computer and we'll pick it up from there note that the following process is designed for pc users and now that's just because most astronomy software is written for pc if you use a mac exclusively there is a similar process using a free piece of software called linkios you may need to use video software like imovie to convert the dot move file from your phone to the mp4 that this software requires anyway there are several youtube videos on how to use linkios i'm going to show you the pc version alright so here we are on the pc and now i've got this video transferred over from the phone to the computer and so here you can see here's saturn it's bouncing all over the place and remember i am just holding the phone up to the telescope's eyepiece here and so it's wandering all over the place and you can see uh how big it is on the screen um and that's just what's realistic for a telescope of this size that's about how big it's gonna be all right so i'm gonna close this taking this video and turning it into a picture that we can share takes two pieces of software and they're both free and you can download them off the internet so the first is called pipp so we're going to start with pipp and the first thing we want to do is drag and drop the file from the phone into the software and here's just a preview of what it looks like i'm going to close that we can see that this video has 300 frames i'm going to take about the first half of those frames just because i in viewing the video those look like the best frames okay oop going back to source files here i'm going to click planetary and that will optimize the file here for planetary imaging look at some options here all right i'm going to crop this video to a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels okay and then checking our output options you want it to be an avi and to save some space on the computer i'm gonna use a little bit of compression here then we're going to click do processing and start processing what this software does is it's going to take that movie file and convert it into an avi file but it's also going to take the image of that planet and center it in the video and that'll make it a lot easier to work with in the next piece of software which is going to turn the video into a still image alright so pipp created a folder and in that folder we can find our new video file and let's watch that video to see if it worked there we go we can see that the video of saturn is now centered in the frame and now this is an avi file instead of the move file from the phone so now we can close pipp we're going to open a piece of software called reggie stacks we're going to hit select and find our file so in the pipp folder we're going to select the avi file and the first thing we want to do here is maybe uh use the slider this is going through all 700 frames and pick a good one where you can see a little bit more detail in the others these look all about the same to me the first thing you're going to do is hit set align points and it's going to choose um two we can add more and what these are going to do is just tell registax where the planet is and now all these frames look pretty good i'm going to select the best maybe 50 so that'll be 350 frames and we're going to align these frames so it's going to throw out half the frames and keep half um and it's gonna make sure they're all lined up they're all lined up pretty good already but you know it makes us go through the process the next thing we're gonna do is hit limit and then i'm gonna leave all these settings the same and then i'm going to hit stack and this will turn that video into an image and this will take for me it's about 10 seconds to process okay now the video has been converted into an image this is where the magic happens we're going to hit wavelet and then in wavelet what we usually do is just play with these little sliders and the sharpen and denoise feature until the planet looks as good as we can make it so usually moving the slider on this wavelet over quite a bit sharpening it up a little bit and then taking the noise away here gives us a pretty good image and now for some reason if i deselect show full image i tend to get a better image here and there we have it that's not bad that's not too bad sometimes you might want to adjust the histogram just a tad and maybe make it a little bit brighter then we're going to hit do all and save the image now we've got a jpeg file of that image that we can then rotate and there's our final image i know it looks a little small given the fact that we use just a small telescope and an iphone that's actually a great image and you might also be able to do better it just takes a little bit of practice well i hope you enjoyed this video on how to see the planets with a telescope if this helps you in any way and you'd like to support me so i can make more of these videos please consider buying 50 things to see with a telescope or 50 things to see on the moon also please subscribe to this channel so you don't miss the next video and remember the future is looking up you

Channel: LearnToStargaze

Views: 182,647

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Id: Ugs1GRZ5N6k

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021