Big Saturn shots with 5mm eyepiece

Biggest photos of Saturn from SX50 HS yet
[Raw - Stacked - Wavelet Processed]

Hoping to get a bigger look at the planets, I bought a 5mm LE series eyepiece from e.Frantis. It would supposedly get twice the magnification of the 25mm eyepiece & 2.5x barlow lens combination. After waiting for more than a week for the weather to clear up, I observed the planet Saturn through the brand new eyepiece. It certainly showed the planet nicely, in spite of being a bit dark due to the high magnification.

Not to miss the opportunity to capture this on camera, I got my SX50 HS camera out and placed it over the eyepiece by hand. After several hundred shots, I was able to recover a handful of good photos. Putting them together, I was able to finally have the Cassini Division on the rings of Saturn properly show up. This fulfilled one of the main expectations I had of the Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope.

As for the actual magnification of the eyepiece, my calculations showed that the photos had a 0.22 arc second / pixel resolution, which is about 6.65 times better than the 50x zoom provided by SX50 HS's integrated lens. This is equivalent to having a 8000mm zoom lens. Also, this is 2.4 times the magnification given by the aforementioned eyepiece-barlow lens combo. This is somewhat higher than expected.

Telescope: Celestron NexStar 6SE + 5mm eyepiece
Device: Canon SX50 HS (afocal)
Settings: 24mm - ISO 200 - 1/5s - f/3.4
Filters: None
Time: 2015-04-27 03:16-03:29 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
23 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

This link is not meant to be clicked. It contains the trackback URI for this entry. You can use this URI to send ping- & trackbacks from your own blog to this entry. To copy the link, right click and select "Copy Shortcut" in Internet Explorer or "Copy Link Location" in Mozilla.

Wesley's Tool-Box on : Brighter Saturn shots

Continue reading "Brighter Saturn shots"
More Saturn shots The superzoom SX50 HS was looking out the window again to shoot Saturn. This time, my three-year old daughter wanted in on the action, so she looked at the viewfinder and took a few shots with my help. She was amazed at how a tiny sta

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

Segar on :

Hello!

Very good images again! It is hard to photograpsh the Cassini Division with afocal photography, but you made it :-)
And it's quite sharp! In my jupiter images there is a strange halo around the planet. I think because the primary mirror is dusty a little bit :/ Have you ever met similar problem?

I use PIPP for planetary images. (https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/) It's makes the pre-processing a lot easier! And it can can crop the frames automatically, wich speed up the processing later! Very usefull software!

I tried to take stillframe sequence of Moon, but is takes too long time. I shoot a fullHD video instead. In a 2minutes video there is 2880 stillframe, and with PIPP, you can sorted the best 100images, and stack it later.
I tried to shoot video from jupiter too, but this halo appeared. I hope it will gone when i clean the mirror.

SO keep up the good work!
And sorry for my english, i am form Hungary.

Wesley on :

Thank you for the encouragement and for suggesting PIPP. That looks like something I can use to simplify my workflow.

I haven't seen any halo when photographing the planets myself, by the way.

Add Comment

E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

Copyright (C) 1996-2024 Woo-Duk Chung (Wesley Woo-Duk Hwang-Chung). All rights reserved.