Planetary Imaging

Imaging planets is a whole new ball game and I am fully appreciating the efforts of those who do this successfully.

I can’t lie, I always felt planetary imaging was easy in comparison to deep sky astrophotography. An easy misconception to assume that in just a new minutes you can snap up a great planetary image. Please please please forgive my ignorance.

As we head into Spring and I consider my astronomy journey, I have been setting up “plug and play” set ups so I can quickly change and adapt my set up based on targets and favorable conditions. One of these set ups has been a planetary, big focal lengths, big appeture. I have 2 scopes to start with, the Skywatcher 200P reflector and the Celestron C8. I’ve set both up and been running some tests. The Celestron C8 has had issues and I will probably cover this in another post, but I’m not convinced it is OK. This scope has history and abuse.

So for now I have swapped over to the 200p. Having tested in daylight and having everything set up as best as I could to get going. The usual hurdles and challenges arose, swapping back to my handset for easy of slewing proved tricky as they dont want to communicate with the mount, power to the mount was intermittent bla bla – the usual troubleshoot everything else before you get to what you need to do.

The forecast was looking good and we have a “planetary alignment” at the moment, rain was forecast to clear and the jet stream is way south of the UK. This sounds like some opportunity for good seeing. So I set the scope set up and 20 minutes later I could not find Jupiter. Red dot aligned, and no slewing could get me to target. Then I realised I had spent the last 15 minutes with the telescope cover still attached!!! Urrrggghhh and darn it, what a moron. So, BINGO, Jupiter in view.

I set focus and off I went imaging in sharpcap. Of course now, it is slightly breezy which is enough to send the 200p scope shaking around like it is in a concert and Jupiter is zig zagging across the screen. Seeing was not as good as I expected and is probably a disadvantage of living near mountains and by the sea. I tried nonetheless to capture what data I could before giving up for a calmer night.

Processing planetary is also quite different but Ive used Autostakkert, Registax etc before with Lunar stuff so I’m ok with it, but still time, good data and practice will make perfect.

So, I am heading into a new journey, I’m happy to stick it out and keep going but I am realising it is going to take a lot of trial to get good data and good seeing. It is more hands on with me being outside and next to the scope rather than tucked away in the warmth but as we head into better weather-why not. Alternativley, I could do a Damian Peach and head to Barbados.