The Night Shall Last Forever

Last weekend's Lunar Eclipse, taken with just my phone through the eyepiece of my small refractor.

Casual Imaging

Despite a clear sky, seeing conditions were deplorable. At the very least I got some ghost craters and a better image of Saturn that isn't a wonky shape. :3

I Doon't Have the [Processing] Power!

Although I am not 100% happy with this image, it is still the best image of Saturn I have yet captured and more than I expected with the compression artefacty raw data I used. Next time I'm going to check to make sure it is good data before I start taking everything apart even if I am cold and tired.

I had originally planned to image Mars since it was a day after its opposition and it's the first time the weather was nice locally on this planet in weeks. Unfortunately the weather on Mars was less than ideal and I could see no surface detail at all. Unless the glare of the moon was washing everything out but I do not think this is the case.

Luckily my favorite planet, Saturn started peeking out from behind the trees so the night was not a total loss! In the image below you can see the Cassini Division even if it isn't very sharp and notice the vague cloud band on the planet itself. My processing wasn't kind to it, but if you look carefully you can also see the shadow cast on the rings behind the planetary sphere.

I tried processing this four seperate times with different reference frames and interestingly, the blurry frames yielded the best results. The frames where I could barely see the Cassini Division caused the final image to look even more distorted and unpleasant to look at.

Who Spilled Ink on my Sun?

Typically, I can get better shots of the sun using just my phone's camera pointed through the eyepiece, (with solar filter in place so my eyes don't burn out or my mirrors melt or something else as spectacularly tragic) but I could never tell if I captured the granulation of the Photosphere or if it was just electronic noise.

This is processed in Registax using the Celestron Neximage 5, which is a ginormous improvement over whatever the name of my previous imager is. I used fewer frames here than I would have otherwise liked and I couldn't tell if I was in focus or not (bahtinov masks don't work on the sun!) So it's less than ideal... but you can clearly see what I'm going to call convection cells. It was also imaged in white light and desaturated so it's not in a pleasing artificial yellow color you might see elsewhere.

As I understand it, no one really knows how to use Registax any better than I do and that makes me feel better.

Whole Worlds on the Head of a Pin

Shimmering atmosphere, no RA drive, some hit and miss clouds, unfamiliar capture software and not a bad image by my standards at all. I hope it doesn't look too yellow on your viewscreens!

Stay tuned for when I actually try to make something nice!

Edit: I now have reason to believe that whitish blob is in fact a cloud and not an ice cap.

Clavius and Friends

This shot is several weeks old but it never posted for some reason.

It is definitely one of my best yet.

Theophilus and a Ghost Crater

Someday I will be good at this. I did manage to capture the remnants of an ancient crater around that lightbulb shaped one, however, in the middle of Sinus Asperatits. My printed authorities tell me the ghost crater is unnamed but the one inside it is called Torricelli and the large crater with a central peak that I used as a reference point is Theophilus.

Selenography

One of these outings I'm going to write down the frame rate and exposure time used to capture a video before I stack them in Registax. I think this is Mare Crissium but I'm not sure. I don't have a lunar atlas and I'm too lazy to look it up any other way.

Worlds Utterly Insignificant

My imager could not detect saturn- whether this is because my telescope does not collect enough photons or I derped the software settings is uncertain- so again I've fallen back to smartphone afocal astrophotography.

Gibbous

It seems to me, I get better lunar shots by pointing my phone camera through the eyepiece of the telescope than anything else. I believe that is called afocal astrophotography...

The Clouds of Jupiter

I do not remember the details of this one... Except that it was captured with the Orion SSSCI-IV and processed in Regiatax and remains my best planetary photo yet.

Sunspots taken with my phone camera (which is why there appears to be darker, shadowy areas on the disk) through a newtonian reflector at, I believe, x75 magnification, and a baadar solar filter in place. At the time I was sure I could see convection cells in the photosphere, but here any granulation is probably electronic noise.