Astrophotography Adventure (cont'd) – Jupiter and Saturn
In my last post in this series, I made my first, pretty successful effort at imaging a Deep Sky Object, namely the Orion Nebula. Using the knowledge that I’d gained from playing with NightCap Pro (NCP) and having already captured the Moon and Jupiter, I thought I’d see what kind of images I could get of Saturn with the Starblast 4.5. But Saturn did not come into my view until well after midnight, while Jupiter was in range for virtually most of the night. So, I figured I’d get a few photos of Jupiter and then leave that set up alone and wait for Saturn to come into view. Here is one of the better images of Jupiter from that night with no post-processing:
My prior images of Jupiter were actually better than this, so, in a way, this result was bit disappointing. After a quick snooze, I came back out and tried to capture Saturn, without much success unfortunately. The image was so small it was hard to know if was really in focus and, because of that, equally hard to adjust the ISO and exposure length to get any detail at all, even just a good image of the rings. Sadly, this is the best I could do, again without any processing:
Pretty badly overexposed and probably not in focus either. Both of the above photos were taken using the 7.5mm eyepiece with a 2x Barlow on the Starblast 4.5 inch, giving a magnification of just under 140x.
Seeing how poorly these images turned out, it was pretty clear that my set up was not correct. I was definitely having issues with determining whether the image was in focus and that made it impossible to get the correct ISO and exposure. Even in my prior images of the Moon, I also had issues with focus. In thinking about this, I came up with a theory of where I was going wrong. My usual process was to focus everything with my own eyes through the eyepiece I was going to use. Then I would attach the iPhone and attempt to take pictures without making any focus adjustment. I’m thinking that my eye and the iPhone lens are actually at different distance from the eyepiece, which is why the images are out of focus. I really just need to focus through the camera. It is really a simple, but rather stupid, error on my part. So, with this knowledge, I will start again with the Moon, focusing through the camera this time. We’ll see how that goes in the next edition…