Currently if you get up just before dawn you can see seven planets stretched from low in the east to high in the south: Mercury, Venus, Uranus, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune & Saturn. I use the word “see” euphemistically because with your naked eye you can’t see either Uranus or Neptune and Mercury is also difficult. A telescope helps in that case! I woke up at 3:15 this morning to try my first attempt at some planetary imaging using the video mode of a new astro camera. The camera shoots between 30 and 50 frames per second and then stacks them. I gathered about a minute and a half of these four objects in order: Saturn, Neptune, Jupiter, and Mars. The conditions weren’t great as there was a lot of turbulence in the air and you could see that during the video capture. Nonetheless you can clearly see the rings of Saturn, the bands on Jupiter and even three of its four of Galilean moons. You can also see the red tinge and slight gibbous phasing of Mars and there is a hint of the bluish color of 2,760,000,000 mile distant ice-giant Neptune. Wasn’t for the trees in my yard I could easily have also captured Uranus and Venus but I’ll leave those for another time. And now that I know more or less how to do this I’ll be playing with planetary and lunar imaging more often. And hopefully with the result of much improved images. It is a journey after all. #zwocameras #asiairpro #asi462mc #clayhausphotography #planets #jupiter #saturn #neptune #mars #astronomy #solarsystem https://www.instagram.com/p/CfT-IIsLAZK/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
