Lunar, Solar, and Planetary Imaging With a Small Telescope

welcome back let's do some lunar solar and planetary imaging but with a small telescope i'll take you start to finish through jupiter and give you some other tips and [Music] tricks i have an orion apex 127 millimeter maxitive telescope and i'm going to be using the 6x26 finder scrape that came with it a really useful piece of equipment is this zoom eyepiece you don't absolutely need one but it's useful when really fine tuning and dialing in your finderscape with your primary scope here i'm using a water tower in a distance make sure your finder and primary are pointed at the same object this will help you so much later i can't emphasize this enough what i really like about having a zoom eyepiece is i can increase the power without having to change eyepieces it saves me a lot of time as i increase the power i further fine-tune my finder scope the dew shield is mandatory on this maxitov i recommend you get one even if you're using a refractor because they also serve to cut down on stray light entering the objective and overall it'll boost the contrast on planets in the moon i'll be using the orion shorty times 2 barlow it's an okay quality barlow but another tip that will greatly improve your results is to purchase a high quality one i'm using the zwo asi 120 mc s camera this camera is relatively cheap and an excellent entry-level planetary camera the orientation of which really doesn't matter it's not crucial but this camera has a really high frame rate that's crucial for beating atmosphere it also has a built-in ir block and filter it's a color camera so processing and acquisition are really easy the results on monochrome with a filter wheel will be a whole lot better but that's time intensive and difficult for a beginner as you can see i'm using a tracking mount but there's no need to guide for planetary i'm using a go-to because a system like this makes it a whole lot easier to keep your planets in frame let's take a moment to go over some really good key points before i show you the live video capture of jeeper first off you're seeing conditions if you're seeing as bad your images are going to be bad good seeing conditions are a must planets require high magnification to resolve detail a good starting point is take your imaging sensor in microns and multiply that number by 5 to 7. that's the focal ratio you should be working at if you're using a one shot color camera make sure you have an ir cut filter if you can help it always photograph your planets at the highest of their elevation there's a lot less atmosphere to look through have you heard the saying that aperture is king and this genre bigger is better it's an unfortunate truth that i'll exclude in this video using my small maxitov larger aperture telescopes will always resolve more detail long focal length telescopes and small sensors are ideal for planetary if you have to use a dslr consider using backyard eos and planetary because if your model camera doesn't have video crop mode it allows you to record directly from a magnified view of the screen alternatively you could use eyepiece projection i have a tutorial on that if you're interested something a lot of people get wrong is not paying attention to the rotation speeds of the planets there is a limit on how long you can record video before the rotation of the planet causes what they call limb blurring this is another reason that high frames per second is important on a planetary camera if you're using a sharp cap use the histogram tool that's built into the program it's excellent focus is absolutely crucial you may consider buying a bat knob mask or if the moon's available you can use the terminating line to really fine-tune your focus it's a whole lot easier than focusing directly off of a planet especially planets like venus here's the settings i used to capture the following video clip of jupiter as you can see it's drifting out of the frame slowly as i only did a very rough polar alignment that doesn't matter i'll show you why in processing this is why you can use a dobsonian or a really cheap german equatorial mount it doesn't matter if you keep the planet centered or not it helps but we're going to go through some processing steps that's going to correct for this [Music] the first step of my process is to stabilize the avi file in a program called pipp it's a free software and it's really good for stabilizing video open your avi file and make sure that you have planetary selected in the menu you can minimize this screen then you'll want to click on due processing this may take a little bit of time depending on your computer's and speed to simplify things we'll leave everything else as default pipp will stabilize your avi so that it is optimized for stacking and here's the result see how there's no drift in the frame it's keeping jupiter really well centered and that's going to help a lot when it comes to stacking in the next program which is auto stacker it's also free software [Music] [Applause] next i'll open the output file that was created by pipp in auto stacker make sure planetary is selected i was using surface previously for sunspots for my data i use size 24 ap which the ap stands for align points i'll let it automatically select them and then i always go to analyze you'll be presented with a graph the center horizontal line represents 50 percent quality every slash mark above it is a frame auto stacker has decided is above the 50 quality of the total frames it's up to you to determine what percentage of total frames to use for my example i'll use half of the total auto stacker will select the best 50 of my frames to stack into one image i then choose to save stack as and name it in the next step i'll use a program called registax6 it's also free software i'm not interested in it for stacking capabilities i just want to use the wavelet function which i personally feel is the best available [Music] from here you can see jupiter looks washed out and has very little surface detail that's why we use wavelets it's a good idea to check your histogram if you feel like it needs stretching try it you can always click reset i'm going to let mine ride on this data as i use the histogram tool and sharp cap during capture earlier i mentioned an ir cut filter if you don't have one or you're using an achromatic scope it's very likely you'll need to go to balance the rgb sharp cap's auto balance function works really good i'm going to load a wavelet preset that i design that saves me a little bit of time try moving your sliders to the position miner in play with it to taste i like to have a good starting point the wavelets will bring out the detail in your object try adjusting the brightness and contrast sliders as well you can also rotate your object to a desired position when you're done do not forget to click do all and then save your image you can save as a jpeg or you can use a tiff file or such if you plan to go to photoshop for additional tweaks and edits this is my final image it's not bad for a 127 millimeter maxitov i can think of a lot of ways to improve it though a higher quality barlow i could use the mono camera with a filter wheel i could have took multiple one minute avi stacks then did a d rotation in a program called wind jupos that would greatly enhance this image i could have had better sand conditions perhaps i could have turned the gain down a touch regardless i'm really happy with this image even though it's a really quick and easy process and limited in exposure time let's take a look at saturn from the same night for whatever reason i only got 30 seconds of data on saturn you can expose for longer than that but for whatever reason i was when i went back to check it i was only at 30 seconds it's not too bad [Music] [Music] the lunar surface is a great place to really get familiar with your seeing conditions it's a big bright target as you know and the surface really reveals how thin the atmosphere is you get used to knowing what you should see here's a little above average seeing for my area this was taken on the same night here's the maxitov with an orion glass solar filter an sv bonnie solar finder and the sv bonnie 105 i chose the 105 for the sun because i don't need especially fast frames the sv body has a little bit more resolution here you can see i'm using the histogram tool i mentioned in sharp cap it takes out all the guess work for it for exposures i highly recommend you use it i'm running out of time every day goes by so fast [Music] and every moment counts baby i don't wanna miss a thing we can sleep under the stars we can sleep under the stars or hang out in hotel bars driving somewhere in your car we can sleep under the stars we can sleep [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Garnett Leary

Views: 30,248

Keywords: astrophotography, planetary, imaging, photographing planets, jupiter, saturn, moon, registax6, stacking, asi120mcs, maksutov, svbony105, capture, pipp, lunar, photography

Id: uUvL0Ssp-Es

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020