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Category: Solar system

Staring at the sun

Staring at the sun

First ever go at solar photography. This is the result of 300 exposures of 0.001 second taken with my telescope and a Baader ND5 film. We can actually count the different sun spots and there’s even some real detail in them. Very cool.

The sun is a yellow dwarf but it’s not really yellow. It emits all visible wavelength colors evenly and so it appears white from space. Our atmosphere gives it the warm yellow-orange color we all know. Here is a side-by-side from the orginal processed capture and the adjusted color curves.

Venus

Venus

In a couple days Venus will be at greatest eastern elongation. Getting any detail out of Venus is a real challenge though. But the real joy here is the simplicy of the setup:

A simple dobsonian telescope, equatorial platform and planetary camera.

No guiding, no cable mess, no polar alignment, no balancing or any of the other mess that is needed for deep space astrophotography. I look forward to planetary season to image Neptune, Mercury and Uranus later this year.

Venus

Venus

Jupiter & Venus are in conjunction now, next time this happens will be in 2032. Imaging our sister planet is very hard but it’s a good excuse for me to take out the 8 inch dob and go old-school planetary mode.

Mars

Mars

After a long six weeks of cloudy nights I could finally take out the Dob again to do some visual. My hope was to have a look at Mars as I missed the planet’s opposition this year due to the aforementioned cloudfest.

Tonight was still not optimal – low clouds all over the place and Mars right next to the near full moon. Still managed to take a picture. Mars is moving away at a fast rate now and I will have to wait till 2025 to hopefully be able to capture it during oppostion.

Outer worlds

Outer worlds

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I decided to focus on planets and experimented with gain/exposure on Jupiter, Saturn. Needless to say I’m absolutely thrilled about the result.

Jupiter resolved way more detail than I expected and the moons Io and Europa as a bonus. Saturn shows cloud bands and the Cassini gap.

All pictures processed with ZWO224MC, 8 inch dob, Orion shorty barlow and IR filter on the camera. Post processed with PIP, AS3, Registax.