I Took a Picture of MARS Through my Telescope

tonight i'm going to take a picture of the planet mars through my telescope not this telescope you'll see right now is an amazing time to take a look at the planet mars because it's nearly at opposition what that means is that it's opposite the sun and from my location it's going to be brighter bigger and most importantly higher than it's been since 2003 so mars is getting bigger and bigger in the night sky leading up to october 13th when it's at opposition so it's the absolute best time to look at the rocky planet mars don't get me wrong this telescope could take some amazing images of the planet mars but i want something with a little more focal length planets are of course very small from our perspective here on earth you need a lot of magnification to get an up close view like a lot of magnification so even though this big refractor telescope has a focal length of over a thousand millimeters we need even more than that so the scope i'm going to put on here is closer to 3000 millimeters that is some serious magnification okay the big refractor telescope is off of the mount now time to mount the big boy which is a different telescope type this one is an sct a schmidt castle grain telescope [Music] [Music] [Music] so for those that don't know what you're looking at here is the celestron edge hd 11 sct telescope so it's a mirrored telescope there's a big primary mirror at the back and then a corrector plate at the front this telescope mount is the eq 8r pro i've been using it for a long time it's a big heavy duty observatory great mount which is necessary for a big heavy telescope like this the guide telescope on top is just a william optics 72 millimeter refractor and then i've got a small asi 120 mm mini guide camera in there and then the camera that's going to be on the back of this telescope is a zwo asi 290 mm mini which is a monochrome camera i'll be using different rgb filters to create a full color image and there's some specific software that i'll use as well and then i've just got some dew heater bands to protect the especially this front corrector plate of the sct from moisture mars doesn't come out for a while so i think i'll do some visual observations first with the eyepiece in the back of the telescope which would be really cool because that means that i can check out jupiter and saturn through this big scope and i haven't done that in a couple of months now this is the eyepiece of the telescope here so visually for viewing the planets this is a 23 millimeter eyepiece 82 degrees field of view so kind of a nice lost in space kind of feeling and this is a nice general all-purpose eyepiece it's a good one it's the celestron luminos but eventually after i view the planets i'm going to slide the diagonal and the eyepiece out and actually put a camera that looks just like this one into the back of the telescope and once it's in there i can focus the camera with the little focuser knob here and then actually i'll have to find the sweet spot for moving that camera to find the right backspacing to get a sharp image of the planet mars [Music] [Music] [Music] well i'm still waiting for mars to get a little higher but while i'm waiting jupiter and saturn look fantastic right now so i brought my wife out to have a look she really enjoys that the moon is just setting now but i had a chance to look at that crescent moon setting through this scope too so really cool [Music] okay so things are going great i'm just practicing on the planet jupiter my process first before mars comes up it's coming up very soon but i want to have my technique down pat and basically what i'm doing is threading rgb filters to the front of the camera and shooting with this monochrome camera through rgb to create that full color image and i just did a test run on jupiter so i should have a great image of jupiter i haven't actually don't really have any great shots of jupiter to date so that would be fun but really it's just a warm up for mars coming up and i feel ready all right so i'm just patiently waiting for mars to get up high enough it will just clear the probably right here on the roof of my house in about an hour so you can see jupiter and saturn over there the bright ones jupiter saturn right there and some of the constellations you can see right now we can see pegasus the great square and cassiopeia and perseus below it and then cepheus is right there and good old polaris big dipper just hiding behind the tree there so just waiting for mars to rise above my house should be about an hour or so [Music] i can't believe the detail i'm seeing in mars i can see one of the polar ice caps i can see dark areas light areas on the planet incredible incredible right now you're looking at the red filter so look at the detail on mars i can definitely see darker regions [Music] and the polar ice cap i'd have to look at a map of mars how it's looking currently but to see that level of detail on another planet and not a gas giant either this is a rocky world that we have rovers driving around on and we're taking pictures and i'm looking at it through my telescope right now live is truly incredible and this is one of those moments when i'm just kind of i'm actually kind of freaking out and i'm keeping it all inside but this is just insane [Music] so you

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 4,177,307

Keywords: Mars, Mars Oppposition, Mars Through Telescope, Planet Mars, Planet through Telescope, How to Photograph Planets, AstroBackyard, AstroBackyard Mars, Taking a Picture of Mars, Planet Photography, Celestron, Celestron Telescope, Mars Opposition 2020, telescope, astronomy, space, photography

Id: veVN3e2n_r8

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020