I don't know about you, but capturing my first image of The planet Jupiter from my back garden was the most amazing thing I had ever done. Well, not discounting getting married or the birth of my daughter. Oh, and running the London marathon, but all that aside, the feeling will never ever leave me: seeing Jupiter whizz past my eyepiece on my wobbly little reflector telescope was cathartic!
A little background on Jupiter: it is the fifth planet from our Sun and the largest planet in our solar system. Jupiter is described as a gas giant, and so you can't walk on Jupiter, but scientists think that it has a solid core of ice, rock and heavy metal elements.
Jupiter's mass is more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, and slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Its diameter is eleven times that of Earth, and a tenth that of the Sun, and it lies around 728 million kilometres away from us. Yup, Jupiter is pretty far away. To put that into perspective, it would take you roughly 19,200 years to walk there, so get your walking shoes on now!
This is an image I took of our Jovian neighbour, Jupiter, and you can see the great red spot and one of the Galilean moons, possibly Ganymede. Jupiter has 95 moons to date. (Source: NASA.org)
Planetary imaging is, of course, a totally different challenge compared to taking images of deep space, and I can say this from personal experience as I have only imaged Saturn and Jupiter, and not very well!
I needed to use a slightly different set-up to capture images of planets, as my camera was different to the dedicated and refined astronomy camera I use now: I used a special planetary camera with a high frame rate and lower sensitivity, which is very different to my deep sky set up.
Atmospheric wobble and disturbances will impact planetary imaging far more than deep sky imaging, but both will continue to be affected by clouds. Gah!
The filters I used for planetary imaging were also quite different: I used a UV/IR cut filter for taking images of planets.
I am by no means an expert at this hobby, and I still have so much to learn, but I am very pleased with my image of Jupiter. If you wish to see truly fantastic images of Jupiter from an amateur astronomer's telescope, look out for the work of Damien Peach and Jorge Segura, or even Ivana's images. Ivana happened to write a great post about planetary imaging on this very website, so be sure to check it out here!
How did I take this image?
I used my Skywatcher 200P telescope OTA (Optical Tube Assembley)
Camera: ZWO 224MC (I now use this as a guide camera for my DSO setup)
1 x 3 minute video with frames extracted
Pre-processed in PiPP (Planetary image Pre Processing)
Stacked in Registaxx and procesed in the same software.
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