Big Saturn shots with 5mm eyepiece

Posted by Wesley on
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
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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

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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.

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