20101119 Jupiter

Now I only have my Ranger with me. Jupiter was hanging outside, so I pulled out my Ranger to place it on my iOptron Cube for a quick look. Since my setup was well aligned to south and parked carefully after each solar observation session, a quick GOTO to the Jupiter was very accurate, the bright dot could be seen with my 20mm Widescan already. I moved it to the dead center and had it sync'ed.

Pushing it with a 2x barlows is easy, and then I soon decided to use my 5x Powermate! Then I moved again and sync'ed the mount again.

I first pulled out my Lumenera LU070M to get a short clip. I adjusted the frame rate to 15 fps in order to use exposure at 1/15s and by adjusting the gain, I get correct exposure without problem. The Jupiter disc was pretty clean on the screen, great and low noise performance. After capturing the clip, I moved back to visual observation.

Observing with a 5x Powermate + 20mm Widescan yields 120x, the Jupiter disc is nice despite pretty poor seeing tonight. Chromatic abberation is definitely there; by replacing the Widescan with a 13mm Nagler Type 6, magification goes up to 185x but the chromatic abberation is much reduced! To my surprise, the iOptron cube tracks pretty well, Jupiter stays in the dead center after five minutes and require only minimal adjustment after 10 minutes.

I enjoy the visual observation time, frankly, I was pretty exploited by the view of bigger telescopes, but I never feel bad only because there're some photons from the celestial objects hitting my eye :-)

Registax finished and here's the result:



2400mm effective focal length, and 1.5x resized after stacking.

a nice short and comfort observation session at home! I've to move back to my revision on Greek :-)

Before selling my DBK, I was thinking that I could always use my DSLR in video mode to capture color planet, but then I found it pretty troublesome. DSLR is much heavier and have a much different focus plane than a webcam or industrial camera, so setting it up would be more time consuming and it could even mean re-balance which is not easy for a small setup!