My first go at Jupiter

Anyone who’s at all been following this blog with its spotty updating and almost random subject matter may be aware I have a couple of long term interests I have recently had the ability to take up, astronomy and photography.

The general idea has been to relearn the basics of photography and get some sort of idea what I’m doing before diving in to a potentially complicated and difficult niche area of photography, which is most certainly what astrophotography can be called.

That said though, there are some objects in the night sky which I would quite like to be able to take the equivalent of “snapshots” of and Jupiter is very definitely that.

So, this is my first go.

Probably worth pointing out that this is slightly more complicated than the average snapshot.

This image is in fact a composite of 5 images of Jupiter which were all taken about ten seconds apart.

I opened each of those photographs in Photoshop and using the opacity mixer, I stacked each of the images on top of each other so they lined up nicely.

There is a little more photoshop trickery in there which I used to brighten the image and reveal two of Jupiters moons; Io is the small dot below and to the right, Ganymede is the small dot above and to the left of the main planet.

I say photoshop trickery, let me assure you that everything you see in that image came through a camera first, nothing has been added.

Below is a 100% crop of the image. It seems that one of my alignments was off by a few pixels, I’ll have another go tomorrow.

A couple of notes about this image. As you can see, it is a little fuzzy, showing not much detail.

That is down to a couple of different things.

The first thing I am going to blame is me. I’m new to this sort of thing and as I said above, astrophotography is a tricky niche of photography. Getting an object which is just about one billion kilometers away into perfect focus is a very much a learning process.

The second thing is my gear. I should note here, I have a ten inch Newtonian telescope  (in the above link, you can see my two sons peering into the business end) which has an F ratio of about f4.7. Isaac Newton would happily have murdered entire populations to get his hands on such an instrument. When I think about what the scientists of the past did with the technology they had, I am humbled by them and in awe at the privelige I have been given.

No, my complaint is not about my telescope. My complaint is more about the mount it sits on. I use what is called a Dobsonian mount which is a very simple and stable Altidude-Azimuth mount reknowned for its stability and ease of use. It is a pure observing mount, taking photographs using a telescope mounted on one is very difficult, as I found out tonight.

Wobbles, bounces, orbital movement and jiggles in position are all nicely compensated for by the eye when using one of these mounts. When a camera is attached though, the slightest movement is magnified, making it very difficult indeed to get a decent focus.

The third thing I’ll blame is the atmosphere of the earth. and the light pollution I get around Corbridge. It isn’t aqs much as some, but it is definitely there and it has its own effect.

Still, all bitching aside, I’m fairly happy with my first go at Jupiter. I now have a a few additions to my christmas list, which I’ll have to see about.